Behind the Story: Little House on the Prairie

Get the real-life story behind Little House on the Prairie before the new Netflix series hits the small screen.

Let’s just get this out of the way: I’m a huge Little House on the Prairie fan. 

If you asked me what book or book series turned me into a reader, I’d probably say the Little House on the Prairie books. I mean, they mean so much to me that one of the things I want to do is to travel to De Smet, South Dakota, to visit the Laura Ingalls Wilder historic home and museum there. 

Yes, I like the TV series from the 1980s, but it’s really the books that captured my little girl heart from that first time my mom read Little House in the Big Woods to me and my brother when we were about 6 years old.

So, when I heard that Netflix had a new TV series adaptation of this beloved favorite planned, my interest was piqued. While Netflix has yet to set a release date, I’m intrigued by a new take on an old favorite. But, in the meantime, while we wait to see the final product, let’s go behind the story to learn more about how this cherished childhood favorite came to be. 

Where did Laura Ingalls Wilder get the idea for her Little House series? 

The simple answer? From her own life. Laura Ingalls Wilder was born in 1867 near the town of Pepin, Wisconsin, the second of five children born to Charles and Caroline Ingalls. When she was around 2 years old, Laura’s family moved to Kansas, carving out a homestead near Independence, Kansas. Eventually, the family moved back to Wisconsin and the experiences there shaped her first two books. The family continued moving westward throughout Wilder’s childhood, though, with stops in Minnesota, Iowa, and finally the Dakota territory. All of these experiences helped to shape and color Wilder’s book series, even though some stops, such as the family’s stay in Burr Oak, Iowa—a painful season for the Ingalls with the birth and death of their only son—are entirely omitted. 

What did the writing process look like for the Little House on the Prairie books?

Laura Ingalls Wilder’s only daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, was a writer herself and urged her mother to record her stories from the frontier. At first, Wilder wrote a memoir called Pioneer Girl, but publishers weren’t interested, so she later revised that book and her memories into a children’s book series. 

Over the years, there have been a lot of questions about Rose’s involvement in the writing process. While Laura wrote the first drafts (often long-hand) which she then mailed from her home in southern Missouri to her daughter, Rose, then living in California. Rose denied involvement in writing the books, but recent scholarship and letters between the mother and daughter reveal a collaborative writing and editing process. Most scholars now believe that Rose played a significant role in editing and revising the books, shaping her mother’s stories into the cherished books we know today. 

Are the Little House books fiction or nonfiction? 

While the Little House on the Prairie books are based in fact, they are a fictionalized version of Laura’s childhood and early adulthood. 

It should also be noted that there are problematic aspects of the novel, including the portrayal of Native Americans (and Caroline Ingalls’ decided prejudice against them) and people of color. In 1954, the American Library Association created a lifetime achievement award for children’s writers and illustrators and awarded the first Wilder Medal to Laura Ingalls Wilder. In 2018, the Association renamed the medal in response the biased language perceived in her work. 

How did the real-life people differ from the characters in the books or TV show? 

I was an adult before I realized that some people didn’t know that the characters in the Little House on the Prairie books and TV show were based on real-life people. Many of the familiar characters—Ma, Pa, and Laura’s sisters, Mary, Grace and Carrie—are all based on real people. But since Wilder’s books are autobiographical fiction, she also used artistic license. Some characters, like the villain of the TV show, Nellie Olsen, are composite characters based on three girls Wilder knew during her childhood. 

The TV show also took many liberties with Wilder’s story, creating characters that never existed (Laura’s sister Mary, who did lose her sight in real life, never married or ran a school for the blind) and the Ingalls never adopted any children (i.e. Albert, James and Cassandra). In fact, Wilder may have romanticized her parents, particularly her father, Charles, in her books. While he was highly respected in real-life, Charles was restless, dealt with serious financial problems and once left town in the middle of the night to avoid paying a hefty bill. 

Want to know more about Laura Ingalls Wilder, her real life on the frontier and how she came to write the beloved children’s book series? Watch Laura Ingalls Wilder: From Prairie to the Page, an excellent PBS documentary that premiered in 2020.

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