Before the Prairie Books: The Writings of Laura Ingalls Wilder 1919-1920: The Farm Home

by Dan L. White (Contributor), Laura Ingalls Wilder

Laura Ingalls Wilder wrote the American classic Little House on the Prairie, from which the award winning television show was taken. Her first book was published in 1932 but long before that Laura wrote magazine articles on small farming and country living. She and her husband Almanzo lived on a small farm near Mansfield, Missouri from 1894 until their deaths, his in 1949 and hers in 1957, and it is from that happy life that the spirit of her books sprang. Laura’s articles are full of merriment, country lore, and old fashioned wisdom. They are the seed stock of the Little House® books.

Laura wrote the articles included in this book during the post war years of 1919 and 1920. After the frugality and self-sacrifice of the war years, the country began adjusting to peace time and having more of everything. The nuggets of wisdom found in her articles are as true then as they are today.

"The character of each individual one of us affects our national character for good or bad."

"It seems rather impossible that such a small thing as individual selfishness could cause so much trouble, but my selfishness added to your selfishness and that added to the selfishness of our neighbors all over the big, round world is not a small thing."

"The more we think for ourselves, the less we shall need advice and high priced experts would not need to waste their time and government money which is really our money, in telling us things we should think out for ourselves."

"We lay away the gleanings of our years in the edifice of our character where nothing is ever lost. What have we stored away, in this safe place during the season that is past? Is it something that will keep sound and pure and sweet or something that is faulty and not worth storing?"

These nearly 40,000 words of Laura’s writings are accompanied by setting and notes by Dan L. White, a fellow Ozarker who has lived for the last quarter century in Laura’s neck of the woods and has authored several books on Laura, including Laura’s Love Story, Laura Ingalls’ Friends Remember Her and Devotionals with Laura.

Genres: Fiction

191 pages, Kindle Edition

First published November 27, 2010

About the author

Dan is an upper-60s father of five grown children and grandfather to twelve grandchildren who has lived and worked with his wife, Margie, for over forty years. For the last almost thirty years, they have lived a quiet, laid-back lifestyle on their forty acre farm not far from where Laura Ingalls Wilder wrote her famous Little House books. Dan has written a number of books about Laura Ingalls and on other subjects including marriage and homeschooling. In 2006, they began Homeschool Helpers to encourage Christian families to center their lives around Christ with the homeschooling lifestyle. https://www.facebook.com/pages/Homesc...

Reviews

[Jamie · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love reading these articles! They really capture the time in a much more honest way than time-period movies. Through Laura's articles for the Missouri Ruralist we catch a glimpse of politics, economics, gender roles, and technology of a quickly changing era. Laura has a lot to say about gridlocked Congressional nonsense (sound familiar?), finding alternatives to gasoline to limit carbon emissions (more familiarity?), the newly won right of women to vote, the use of time and necessity of doing Work-what you do for pay and to make a living versus what you do that makes a contribution to your community. Her articles, often based on her reading of National Geographic and letters from her daughter Rose who traveled as a journalist, introduced family farmers to locations across the ocean which that had never imagined. In one of her articles, she talks about scientific experiments which led to learning about Earth's atmosphere and the "air submarines" scientists and engineers were trying to build to explore space. It's so much fun to read about these real-time events for her time, since all I associate her with are the Little House books!

More and more I do not appreciate Dan White's commentary before her articles. Rather than simply giving historical context to an article, he editorializes a lot and butts in his own opinion or comparison to present-day events.