Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder

I was completely absorbed by this “biography of a book,” the story of how the Little House series came to be, in a matrix of complex historical and personal circumstances that also illumine a great deal in the history and biography of America.

Rose Wilder Lane was clearly a disturbed person. However, without her I do not think this great work of American literature would ever have come to be, so we owe her a certain measure of gratitude. And it's sad that her own talent was overshadowed by her mental and psychological handicaps, which at the time went unrecognized and untreated, and funneled into her Libertarian obsessions.

Unexpectedly this book helped me to understand the roots of the increasing intransigence of conservatives in the perhaps necessary, but insensitive and short-sighted treatment of agricultural overproduction during the New Deal, which created an alienation and divisiveness that has only gotten worse.