I recommend reading in this order: the Little House books (depending on how well you know them; in your case, it sounds like a reread is in order), then Pioneer Girl, then Prairie Fires.
Pioneer Girl, as you may know if you own it, but for anyone else reading this, is a previously unpublished manuscript that was the predecessor to the Little House books. It's Laura writing down her stories for Rose. It reads more like The First Four Years than the other books, because Pioneer Girl and First Four Years were written by Laura and either not edited (PG) or lightly edited (FFY), whereas the others were collaborations with a whole lot of reworking (and it shows). The manuscript in Pioneer Girl is, furthermore, meant to be much more nonfictional, a mother writing for her daughter, than the Little House books. That's not to say that she always describes everything as it happened, though, both because her memory was human and imperfect, and because she was also writing with an eye toward eventual publication (I use "more" in "more nonfictional" advisedly). That's where the heavy, heavy editorial annotation is valuable.
The quality of the annotation is mixed, some of those notes made me (and others) raise an eyebrow, but if you want to understand better what "really" happened, then the book as a whole is indispensable.
Prairie Fires was a Pulitzer-Prize winning biography that came out in 2017. It's heavy on the history of the place and time in which Laura lived, and it's critical in both senses of the word. The editor of Pioneer Girl is much more sympathetic to Laura and the Ingalls; Prairie Fires is pretty demythologizing. It reads like a history book and is fascinating if you're sufficiently interested; it doesn't have the kind of gripping, novelistic prose that makes me recommend books to people to get them interested in a new subject.
Disclaimer: the 19th century is not my period (that would be the 18th, and European, not American), so I can't speak to the quality of the history in Prairie Fires, but with that caveat, I do recommend it.
As for revisiting the Little House books as an adult, a very common reaction is "WOW the racism D:", but also the quality of the writing holds up for a lot of people (me and Rachel included) who loved the books as children and still love them as food porn and comfort reads.
ETA: Oh, the other thing that I recommend is a scholarly article that's available in full online, "Little Squatter on the Osage Diminished Reserve": https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/188052255.pdf. That was what got me interested in Laura Ingalls Wilder scholarship despite generally having little interest in the 19th century.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2023-03-18 01:59 am (UTC)Pioneer Girl, as you may know if you own it, but for anyone else reading this, is a previously unpublished manuscript that was the predecessor to the Little House books. It's Laura writing down her stories for Rose. It reads more like The First Four Years than the other books, because Pioneer Girl and First Four Years were written by Laura and either not edited (PG) or lightly edited (FFY), whereas the others were collaborations with a whole lot of reworking (and it shows). The manuscript in Pioneer Girl is, furthermore, meant to be much more nonfictional, a mother writing for her daughter, than the Little House books. That's not to say that she always describes everything as it happened, though, both because her memory was human and imperfect, and because she was also writing with an eye toward eventual publication (I use "more" in "more nonfictional" advisedly). That's where the heavy, heavy editorial annotation is valuable.
The quality of the annotation is mixed, some of those notes made me (and others) raise an eyebrow, but if you want to understand better what "really" happened, then the book as a whole is indispensable.
Prairie Fires was a Pulitzer-Prize winning biography that came out in 2017. It's heavy on the history of the place and time in which Laura lived, and it's critical in both senses of the word. The editor of Pioneer Girl is much more sympathetic to Laura and the Ingalls; Prairie Fires is pretty demythologizing. It reads like a history book and is fascinating if you're sufficiently interested; it doesn't have the kind of gripping, novelistic prose that makes me recommend books to people to get them interested in a new subject.
Disclaimer: the 19th century is not my period (that would be the 18th, and European, not American), so I can't speak to the quality of the history in Prairie Fires, but with that caveat, I do recommend it.
As for revisiting the Little House books as an adult, a very common reaction is "WOW the racism D:", but also the quality of the writing holds up for a lot of people (me and Rachel included) who loved the books as children and still love them as food porn and comfort reads.
ETA: Oh, the other thing that I recommend is a scholarly article that's available in full online, "Little Squatter on the Osage Diminished Reserve": https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/188052255.pdf. That was what got me interested in Laura Ingalls Wilder scholarship despite generally having little interest in the 19th century.