Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little Town: Where History and Literature Meet
Miller (Looking for History on Highway 14, Iowa State Univ. Pr., 1993) seeks to demonstrate how history both informs and is revealed in Laura Ingalls Wilder's novels. Taking concepts such as place and community, freedom and control, and love and affection, he considers how they operate in Wilder's novels of prairie life. He also tackles the question of the contribution of Wilder's daughter to the finished product, concluding that Rose Wilder Lane's editing greatly enhanced the novels' literary merit. Miller's final three chapters discuss the real world that lay beyond Wilder's family history, showing that much social and community life is left out of Wilder's books. Though grounded in painstaking research of the Dakotas of the 1880s, this book fails to demonstrate its thesis conclusively. The various topics do not cohere, and while we learn something of prairie history, it does not illuminate Ingall's writing. For "Little House" specialists and historians of the American frontier.Marie L. Lally, Alabama Sch. of Mathematics & Science, MobileCopyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.