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Notes From the Book Review Archives

This week’s cover story is a review of Caroline Fraser’s biography of Laura Ingalls Wilder. In a 1971 review of Wilder’s posthumous book, “The First Four Years,” Eleanor Cameron wrote of the importance of this American author and her “Little House” series.

Out of an impassioned childhood desire to share life visually with her blind sister Mary, Laura Ingalls Wilder took her first steps toward the writing of the “Little House” books, which have become for children what Conrad Richter’s “The Trees,” “The Fields” and “The Town” have for adults: a classic saga of the opening up of the frontier. And long before Laura reached her 60th year, when she began writing, she had remarked of the James River in her diary “On the Way Home,” that she “wished for an artist’s hand or a poet’s brain or even to be able to tell in good plain prose how beautiful it was.”

Good plain prose was precisely the prose Laura used but there was always a poet in her, an impressionist. And it is a curious fact, one that is true of most children’s writers, that as long as Laura was re-creating her childhood years, she could keep the poetic vision, her impressionist’s eye that never fails to kind her “good will prose” in the series all the way to “The Happy Golden Years,” which tells of Almanzo’s courtship. Somehow, for this kind of writer, what is seen and experienced in childhood is burningly real and timeless in a way that whatever happens later can never be.

We recall Henry James’s reminder that the supreme virtue of the novel is its truth of detail, its air of reality, its “solidity of specification.” What is unfailingly engrossing in the “Little House” books is the artistry with which Mrs. Wilder weaves one unforeseen event, one astonishment after another into all the fascinating “solidities of specification” of frontier life in such a way that even a young can understand the basics of how to build a log cabin, make a smoke house out of a hollow tree, make a button lamp, or solid fuel out of hay. And these details are embedded so deeply in the vibrantly felt spirit of the place that the child reader experiences intimately the very fell and taste and smell and bite of being a settler’s daughter in the brooding Wisconsin wilderness or in the midst of the endless prairie.

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A version of this article appears in print on  , Page 6 of the Sunday Book Review. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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