How the South Won the Civil War: Oligarchy, Democracy, and the Continuing Fight for the Soul of America

by Heather Cox Richardson

Wilder loathed the New Deal, and her portrait of her upbringing was the western individualist mythology personified. In her stories, Pa was the rock of the family, protecting them from Indians and providing for his wife and four girls with the deer he shot, the muskrat he trapped, and the fields he planted. Men had to look out for themselves, he told Laura, because they were “free and independent.”35 In fact, Pa had never been able to support his family; he had relied on income from the work of Laura, her sisters, and her mother. To hear Wilder tell it, the family had scrimped and saved to send her blind sister Mary to college; the reality was that the state of South Dakota had paid for six years of tuition and room and board for Mary, and the family had scrimped and saved for the money to buy her clothes and her train ticket. Nonetheless, that image of an independent man caring for his loving wife and daughters struck a chord in the Depression, and the Little House books instantly became—and remain—some of the most influential American literary works of all time.