If, like so many Americans, you read the Little House on the Prairie series as a child, you probably think you know Laura Ingalls Wilder. After all, semiautobiographical books were based on Wilder’s own experiences as a girl who grew up in a family of pioneers, moving further and further west.
But a new American Masters documentary about the children’s author reveals what the books left out: a much more tortuous path “West”, how Wilder’s daughter helped write the novels and more. He also investigates Wilder’s role in forging the ideal of rude individualism – despite how his own family benefited from government aid – and his racist representations of Native Americans in the House Series.
Below, read about how director Mary McDonagh Murphy examined various aspects of Wilder’s life and work – and see American Masters: Laura Ingalls Wilder on December 29, at 9 pm, on PBS.
What was your personal relationship with the books, before working on this documentary?
Well, this is a funny situation because I never read books when I was a kid. I mean I did [an American Masters documentary on] Harper Lee and I had more or less the same experience there, which I left school without ever reading Kill hope. And then, I found out as an adult.
I read These happy golden years [the eighth Little House book], that my aunt Marilyn gave me for Christmas one year, when I was 12 years old. I loved that book because it was about dating, and Laura was a teacher and needed to find her way in the world. And then I went back and tried to read some of the others, but I think I was too old, so I never really consumed them as a child.
What do they like to read as adults?
Caroline Fraser, who wrote Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Pulitzer Prize winning biography, says this in the film … reading them as an adult is a completely different experience. I mean, you can be totally charmed by the gingerbread, beaten butter and playing with pig bladders as a game. But as an adult, you can read between the lines and see how terrible the situation was.
I met someone when I started my research, a professor at NYU. I met her at a Hanukkah party, and she said that she was reading them with her little daughter. And she looked at me and said, “Dad was crazy.”
Courtesy Amazon
So, how did the documentary come about?
American Masters came to me. I think I was at the height of my film Harper Lee; He had already shown that he knew how to distill a book and talk about a writer. However, this was a much more difficult process. Because there are nine books too – it’s a big distillation problem, unlike anything I’ve had to do before. The process was very, very difficult.
Why do you think these books are still so popular?
I think Laura is a very attractive character. She is adventurous. She’s a tomboy. She is not a good girl. I mean, she cleaned it up with the mean Nelly Olsen. And she is self-sufficient and is going through some very, very difficult things. I also think that the father is a great romantic father – and everyone wants a great father, but not everyone has him.
The documentary shows how imperfect Pa was in real life. What do you think about him?
It is difficult to know what the father really was like, because there is not much first-hand research you can do about him. He did not keep a diary. There are no notes. There is only one letter that he wrote to his brothers. So without asking your father, without asking Charles Ingalls, it is difficult to know what he thinks.
But I think we have a good case to show you that it … the grass wasn’t always greener with every move to the west. And although this is attributed in books to his wandering foot, which seems very romantic, I mean that he has led them into deeper and more dire financial circumstances almost every time they moved. I think the music and the stories contributed to a really great family life. So, of course, I think Laura Ingalls Wilder loved her father. And these books also remember that.
Yes. And Wilder’s childhood is also obviously edited in books – and it looks like she started to believe her own myth about herself.
That’s what she wanted to believe, that’s what Caroline Fraser says.
But I think the other point that could be addressed here is that she wrote for children. And she was the author of children’s books. So you don’t … If you are writing for small children and we are talking about small children, from five to eight, nine. You don’t almost want to be attacked in Iowa at a strange hotel. This is not really for your readers. So I think it’s a little bit of both – that is, there are things that you don’t want to revisit in your childhood and there are also things that you think are not suitable for young children.
How did you think about how to approach racism and other questionable aspects of Wilder’s books?
Well, I interviewed many, many, many people before deciding who we finally included in the documentary … Linda Sue Park is very effective in saying that the books really hurt her, that that description was really painful for her to read. And I am very grateful to Louise Erdrich, who is just an acclaimed and magnificent novelist, but who also wrote all these children’s books, the Birchbark Series. Teachers use House and they use Birchbark books because they are an antidote to the House stories.
I think [Erdrich] says, “You read them because they are great stories.” And you don’t understand as a child that you are valuing – I thought that valuing was the perfect word – that you are valuing this racism, the absence of an entire group and culture.
What do you expect people to get out of the documentary?
I think you can go down wherever you want in the books – whether you find them too golden or transparent, or if you love them more than life itself. But I think what guided me through this difficult process was Laura’s life. That’s what I want people to understand.
Your life is remarkable. I mean, it’s amazing what she had to do, and it’s hard to know what she was thinking or feeling about it, because she didn’t keep a diary, and there’s nothing in our letters that tells us a lot about her emotional life. So you have to read between the lines with it. But what she endured – I mean, it is just difficulty after difficulty after difficulty. And then, she came out on the other side and created something like [the book series] that endures. I think it’s an incredible achievement.
This content is created and maintained by third parties and imported into this page to help users provide their email addresses. You can find more information about this and other similar content on piano.io