Back Laura Ingalls Wilder: The Little House Books, Volume 1 Print
Laura Ingalls Wilder: The Little House Books, Volume 1
Little House in the Big Woods | Farmer Boy | Little House on the Prairie | On the Banks of Plum Creek
Edited by Caroline Fraser
Moving from Wisconsin to Kansas to Minnesota, the story of the Ingalls family relates an entire epoch in the settling of America.
Caroline Fraser: Why the Little House books are enjoyed by both children and adult readers
Prairie Fires: Laura Ingalls Wilder's story of poverty, struggle, and reinvention
Pulitzer winner Caroline Fraser on the "deep and unresolved tensions" in the Little House books
Buy both Little House volumes in a specially designed boxed set and save $15!
In 1930, at the age of sixty-three, Laura Ingalls Wilder began to write of her experiences growing up on the American frontier. Born in a log cabin just after the Civil War, she "had seen and lived it all"—the wild woods, Indian country, the building of the railroads, the hardscrabble life of the homesteader, the overnight rise of towns and farms—an entire epoch in the settling of America. She found a unique form in which to tell her story, an episodic sequence of novels for young readers now loved the world over. Together the Little House books constitute a classic of children's literature and a definitive firsthand account of the pioneer experience.
In this and a companion volume, Library of America presents all nine of the Little House books in the order in which they were published. The first four are novels of childhood, beginning with Little House in the Big Woods (1932), in which Laura Ingalls, age five, keenly experiences the turning of the year in the Wisconsin wilderness. Each season has its work and its rituals, overseen by Ma and Pa with cheerfulness and an exacting economy. Hunting, planting, harvesting, butchering—Laura learns all of these by example, and by helping her parents in any way she can. In the evenings she delights in Pa's stories, the songs played on his fiddle, and the cozy warmth of the hearthside.
Farmer Boy (1933) tells the parallel story of Almanzo Wilder, the boy who will soon light out for the territory and eventually meet, court, and marry Laura, but who first must learn his father's way of life on a farm in upstate New York. Little House on the Prairie (1935) takes Laura's family from Wisconsin to Kansas, where they attempt to stake a claim despite illness, prairie fires, and uncertain encounters with Osage Indians. In On the Banks of Plum Creek (1937), the family moves to Minnesota and raises a promising crop of wheat only to lose it to a voracious swarm of grasshoppers.
These four novels, like the five that follow, are presented by Library of America without the illustrations and typographical trappings of editions designed for young readers. Here Wilder's prose for the first time stands alone and can be seen for exactly what it is—a triumph of the American plain style. An appendix contains two little-known speeches in which Wilder discusses the craft of writing historical fiction.
Caroline Fraser, editor, is the author of God's Perfect Child: Living and Dying in the Christian Science Church and Rewilding the World: Dispatches from the Conservation Revolution. She has written on Laura Ingalls Wilder and other subjects for publications including The New York Review of Books, London Review of Books, The Atlantic, and The New Yorker.
This Library of America series edition is printed on acid-free paper and features Smyth-sewn binding, a full cloth cover, and a ribbon marker.
Laura Ingalls Wilder: The Little House Books, Volume 1 is kept in print by a gift from The Berkley Foundation to the Guardians of American Letters Fund in honor of Marjorie Berkley.
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ISBN: 978-1-59853-160-2 634 pages
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N° 229 Library of America Series
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