Prairie Fires: the American dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder by Caroline Fraser

[Therese Scott]

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize,  this is a comprehensive biography of the iconic writer Laura Ingalls Wilder of 'Little House on the Prairie' fame amongst many other titles. Her stories  of a simple, happy but sometimes hard and cruel life on the prairies as a child and then with her husband are some of the most popular in American literature, up there with 'Little Women'. I found the first section very interesting as it went through the violent and fraught years for the Indigenous population, the Dakota, as they found their traditional lands taken off them quite arrogantly by the new settlers themselves in search of a better life.