Little House on the Prairie Summary: A Guide to Laura Ingalls Wilder's Prairie Novel
What Little House on the Prairie is about
Little House on the Prairie, published in 1935, is the third novel in Laura Ingalls Wilder's series of American children's books. It is set on the Kansas prairie in the 1870s and follows a settler family building a home on open grassland, far from established towns.
The series as a whole is drawn from Wilder's own life. The books are based on her childhood and adulthood in the American Midwest, across Wisconsin, Kansas, Minnesota, South Dakota and Missouri, between 1872 and 1894. Kansas is the stretch of that life this particular volume covers.
The shape of the book is the shape of settlement itself. A family arrives somewhere with almost nothing in place and sets about making it liveable. Shelter has to be built. Water has to be found. Food has to be grown, hunted or carried in. The weather is not a backdrop but a force that decides what the day will hold. There is no large plot engine driving things forward in the way an adventure story would have one. The interest comes from watching ordinary necessary work done well, and from the sense that nothing on the prairie is guaranteed.
That is also why the book reads so differently from most children's fiction. It is quiet, practical and detailed. Readers who want constant incident sometimes find it slow. Readers who like knowing exactly how a thing is made tend to find it absorbing.
The main characters
The series takes its view from Laura Elizabeth Ingalls, the author's younger self, and she is the figure the reader travels with. Her family surrounds her, and the family unit rather than any single individual is really the central character. Decisions are made for the household. Risk is shared by the household. Success means the household has got through another season.
It is worth knowing that these are novels, not memoirs, even though they are built from real people and real places. Wilder was writing decades later, reshaping her own history for young readers. The second book in the series steps away from her entirely and tells the story of her husband's childhood instead, which shows how freely she worked with the material she had.
The themes
Four ideas run through the book, and they pull against each other in interesting ways.
Family is the first. Everything in the story depends on people who can rely on one another, because there is no one else to rely on. The household is the whole social world for long stretches.
Survival is the second, and it is treated without drama. Food, fire, water and shelter are the plot. The book takes seriously the question of how people actually stayed alive on open land, and it does not pretend the answer was easy.
Nature is the third. The prairie is beautiful and indifferent in equal measure. It gives and it withholds, and the family has no power over which it will do.
Freedom is the fourth, and it is the most complicated. The pull westwards is a pull towards space and self-determination. But the book also shows what that freedom costs: isolation, uncertainty, and a life with no safety net under it. Modern readers also bring their own questions to the settlement of land that was not empty, and those questions sit in the book whether or not Wilder intended them to.
Where it sits in the series
Wilder completed eight novels, all published by Harper & Brothers during her lifetime in the 1930s and 1940s. A first draft of a ninth was published after her death in 1971 and is usually counted as part of the series. A tenth title, On the Way Home, is non-fiction: her diary of the years after 1894, when she, her husband and their daughter moved from De Smet in South Dakota to Mansfield in Missouri, where they settled for good. It appeared in 1962 with commentary by her daughter, Rose Wilder Lane.
Why it still matters
Little House on the Prairie has had a second life far beyond the page. It has been adapted for stage and screen more than once, most successfully as the American television series of the same name, which ran from 1974 to 1983 and introduced the story to an audience that had never read it. There has also been an anime version, Laura, the Prairie Girl, along with spin-off books, cookbooks and a wide range of licensed products.
The book suits readers of around seven and up, and it works particularly well read aloud. It is also a steady choice for adults returning to something they met as children. Its lasting appeal is simple enough: it records a way of living that has vanished, in plain language, from the point of view of a child who was there.
