Finding America, Both Red and Blue, in the ‘Little House’ Books

Laura Ingalls Wilder,
 circa 1885

(NYTimes) Nothing about Laura Ingalls’s birth to a modest Wisconsin family on Feb. 7, 1867, suggested she would become one of the most significant voices in the canon of the American frontier. A century and a half later, the contribution Laura Ingalls Wilder made still seems astonishing — a fact not lost on her publisher.
As a new anniversary-themed batch of “Little House on the Prairie” books began rolling in this fall — with homespun-looking covers and new introductions by luminaries including Laura Bush and Patricia MacLachlan, the author of the gentle Newbery Medal-winning novel “Sarah, Plain and Tall” — I found myself plunging back into the Little House world I’d loved as a child, with a strange feeling of urgency. Continued