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Reading: Prairie Fires
Jul. 17th, 2018 06:02 pmI adored Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House books when I was a child; I can only have been five or six when I first read them (young enough not to be entirely clear on the difference between space and time, so that when we moved to the US just before my seventh birthday I had a confused idea that it was going to be like the America of a century earlier depicted in the books, as that was the only thing I'd ever read set there), and I have re-read them again and again over the years, so when I heard about Caroline Fraser's new biography, Prairie Fires, I was very keen to read it. And I have to say, I wasn't disappointed - weighing in at 515 pages plus notes, my hardback copy of Prairie Fires was a challenge to carry around with me while I was reading it, but once I'd started it I found myself completely unable to keep it for home and find something else to read while I was out and about.
Prairie Fires is a deeply scholarly literary biography - the pages and pages of references attest to the meticulousness of Fraser's research - which interweaves the "real" story of Laura Ingalls Wilder's life and its relationship to the fictionalised version depicted in her books with the wider historical picture and a detailed study of the relationship between Wilder and her daughter, the libertarian journalist Rose Wilder Lane, whose editing of her mother's books played a fundamental role in shaping the final narratives. Where I thought Fraser's work was particularly brilliant was in the way her exposition of the historical background not only sheds light on Wilder's life and work, but on the factors that shaped the America she lived in and continue to shape the present-day country; the distrust of government intervention and emphasis on self-reliance (there is a reference to the governor of Minnesota organising a "day of prayer" for farmers whose crops had been destroyed by locusts, which was very reminiscent of the much-mocked "thoughts and prayers" offered up by today's Republicans), the effects of changes to the climate triggered by human actions and the rejection of the expert advice that might have averted problems up to and including the devastation of the Dust Bowl, and Rose Wilder Lane's journalistic conflation of fact and fiction which comes across as very much the precursor of "fake news". It's a terrific book, and I recommend it wholeheartedly to anyone who enjoyed the Little House books. (It's also made me want to go off and re-read them myself, although some of my 39-year-old copies are very much the worse for wear and I might need to look out for new reading copies - Little House in the Big Woods in particular is basically falling to bits.)
Prairie Fires is a deeply scholarly literary biography - the pages and pages of references attest to the meticulousness of Fraser's research - which interweaves the "real" story of Laura Ingalls Wilder's life and its relationship to the fictionalised version depicted in her books with the wider historical picture and a detailed study of the relationship between Wilder and her daughter, the libertarian journalist Rose Wilder Lane, whose editing of her mother's books played a fundamental role in shaping the final narratives. Where I thought Fraser's work was particularly brilliant was in the way her exposition of the historical background not only sheds light on Wilder's life and work, but on the factors that shaped the America she lived in and continue to shape the present-day country; the distrust of government intervention and emphasis on self-reliance (there is a reference to the governor of Minnesota organising a "day of prayer" for farmers whose crops had been destroyed by locusts, which was very reminiscent of the much-mocked "thoughts and prayers" offered up by today's Republicans), the effects of changes to the climate triggered by human actions and the rejection of the expert advice that might have averted problems up to and including the devastation of the Dust Bowl, and Rose Wilder Lane's journalistic conflation of fact and fiction which comes across as very much the precursor of "fake news". It's a terrific book, and I recommend it wholeheartedly to anyone who enjoyed the Little House books. (It's also made me want to go off and re-read them myself, although some of my 39-year-old copies are very much the worse for wear and I might need to look out for new reading copies - Little House in the Big Woods in particular is basically falling to bits.)
