by Spencer Howard
With the release of the new Netflix series Little House on the Prairie based on the books written by Laura Ingalls Wilder, the Library has seen renewed interest in an age-old question: Are the Little House books fact or fiction?
The short answer is some of both. The books are semi-autobiographical; they loosely follow Laura’s real-life pioneer upbringing and contain charming factual descriptions of life on the frontier. But many of the stories were substantially altered to craft compelling historical fiction for young readers.
A longer answer is more complicated. The Little House books had their genesis in a non-fiction memoir that Laura wrote around 1930 entitled Pioneer Girl. Like all accounts based on long-held memories, Laura’s stories included some mistaken episodes or details. Research over the past several decades has cleared up many of these mysteries, and scholars continue to study Pioneer Girl as an important source of information on the “real” Laura.
When Pioneer Girl was rejected by publishers, Laura’s daughter Rose Wilder Lane, a highly respected professional writer, excerpted some of the material into a draft picture book for young children. An editor at Harper Brothers, Marion Fiery, liked the basic material and asked for something longer, aimed at 8- to 12-year-olds. Rose became her mother’s coach, editor and literary agent. Together they reworked Laura’s stories about Wisconsin into Little House in the Big Woods, which was published in 1932.
The book was an immediate hit, and the public and the publisher asked for more. Mother and daughter collaborated over the next decade to publish the eight Little House novels that have captivated young readers for generations. Much of the collaboration for the first four volumes happened across the kitchen table – Rose was living on her parents’ farm to make ends meet during the Great Depression. As the economy improved in the mid-1930s, Rose began selling more of her own writing and moved away to resume her career. From that point, the Little House collaboration continued largely by letter, and that correspondence provides an intimate view of the creative process.
In one letter dated January 21, 1938, Rose lectured her mother about being too slavish about facts.
You must take into account the actual distinction between truth and fact. It is beyond all human power to tell all the facts. Your whole life spent at nothing else would not tell all the facts of one morning in your life, just and ordinary morning when you get up, dress, get breakfast and wash the dishes. Facts are infinite in number. The truth is a meaning underlying them; you tell the truth by selecting the facts which illustrate it.
Rose coached her mother that a story must have an arc and a central theme, and that facts in a story must be believable and advance the plot or develop a character. Most importantly, they must connect with the reader.
One example of fact turned into fiction is the story, as told in the fifth volume By the Shores of Silver Lake, of how Laura’s sister Mary became blind. The published text reads, “Mary and Carrie and baby Grace and Ma had all had scarlet fever. Far worst of all, the fever had settled in Mary’s eyes and Mary was blind.” But that’s not what Laura remembered. In a letter to Rose dated March 23, 1937, Laura recalled,
Mary had
spinal meningitissome sort of spinal sickness. I am not sure if the Dr. named it. We learned later when Pa took her from De Smet, South Dakota to Chicago, Illinois to a specialist that the nerves of her eyes were paralyzed and there was no hope.
Why did they – most likely Rose – change the ailment to scarlet fever? Correspondence between Rose and Laura suggests they wanted to simplify the story and not dwell on the tragedy. They discussed measles and scarlet fever as illnesses young readers could relate to, and researchers have suggested that they may have settled on scarlet fever because it was a key plot point in 19th century novels such as Frankenstein and Little Women.
Even though the Little House books are a fictionalized account of Laura’s childhood, they do provide an engaging narrative of the frontier experience with many true-to-life details. But what has drawn generations of readers to the series is perhaps not the facts, but the deeper truth that the series conveys. As Laura noted,
Running through all the stories, like a golden thread, is the same thought of the values of life. They were courage, self reliance, independence, integrity and helpfulness. Cheerfulness and humor were handmaids to courage… [My parents’] old fashioned character values are worth as much today as they ever were to help us over the rough places.