Nationalism, Nostalgia, and Intergenerational Girlhood

In an article published in The Horn Book Magazine, Barbara Bader reflects that, in “looking backward, it takes no deep thought to name Little House in the Big Woods as the most important American children’s book in the first half of the twentieth century—the work of fiction that, with its sequels, made the largest imprint on the national consciousness.” ¹ First published in the 1930s and 1940s but set in the 1870s and 1880s, the eight volumes of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s historical autofiction—beginning with Little House in the Big Woods (1932) and Farmer Boy (1933) and ending with Little Town on the Prairie (1941) and These Happy Golden Years (1943)—have been read and reread by three generations of child and adult readers. Little House on the Prairie (1935), easily the best-known volume, was twice adapted for television, including a pilot telefilm that launched a highly popular television series originally airing between 1974 and 1983 and that continues to appeal to viewers through reruns and DVDs. ² Moreover, as Wendy McClure notes in The Wilder Life: My Adventures in the Lost World of Little House on the Prairie (2011), the imagined kinship between her and Wilder’s semiautobiographical protagonist was not only absolute but also shared by millions of fellow readers—“we were a girl named Laura, who lived and grew up and grew old and passed on, and then she became a part of us somehow. She existed fully formed in our heads, her memories swimming around in our brains with our own.” ³