Fascinating read if you loved the Little House on the Prairie series ... this book digs deeper and goes into all that Laura left out (and why), plus her life after the series ended. Well foot-noted and referenced. Sometimes a little dry/academic, but enlightening on the relationship between Laura and her daughter Rose.

I actually didn't finish the book. It was interesting in the beginning as it detailed some of the differences between real life and Laura's fiction life. The book started to lose my interest once it got to the point where they relocated to Mansfield. To be fair, I don't know much about that point in Laura's life, because that is where the books stop, so that may be part of why I lost interest.

I loved the little house books, and really enjoyed learning more about Laura’s life and how she came to write the books. I was a bit disappointed to see the difficult relationship she had with her daughter, Rose. Much of the personal information in this book is from Rose’s perspective, because Laura didn’t journal or save records like Rose. Rose did her editing and worked for varying amounts of time -days to months- on different books. It’s funny how Rose’s writing was more famous at the time, but Laura’s is what’s endured. I think Laura Ingalls Wilder was a remarkable woman, and an amazing storyteller.

interesting

A biography that delves into the mother daughter relationship of Laura and Rose and the love, animosity and battle for control of the writing process.
It brings you into their on again off again home where daughter tries to control the situation but ultimately allows her mother to tell her childhood adventures.
Snippets of history and marriage set the backdrop, and gives a glimpse into Laura's early determination to do as her mind and fortitude allow her.

This was a disappointingly dull reflection on Laura's life, which was a life full of adventure and triumph over adversity. I found the author condescending and judgmental towards the old fashioned values that gave her success. The level of control she exercised over her daughter Rose's life was imagined without any evidence other than Rose's whiny letters. I'm not convinced.

With apologies to the probable majority of people reading this, for the people who haven’t heard of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House Series: it’s a series of eight books written in the late 1930s and early 1940s about a girl growing up in the United States Midwest between 1867 and 1885, following approximately the European expansion west into what had hitherto been Native American land. The series begins with the main character’s early childhood in “the Big Woods” in Wisconsin, and follow her family’s moves West ending up in De Smet, South Dakota (check this!) where Laura, in her late teens by the end of the series, meets and marries one Almanzo Wilder. Becoming Laura Ingalls Wilder, by John E. Miller, covers her childhood years briefly, but picks up in greater detail with her marriage and later life.

The Little House books are ostensibly Laura’s1 own biography. Hopefully it does not (really) come as a surprise to any adults familiar with the series that while the author stuck reasonably closely to her own life, the books themselves are fictionalized to a great extent. They’re not in libraries’ fiction collections by mistake. Many of the changes serve only to streamline the story line. Some are minor--the children’s ages were advanced by a couple of years, the cause of Mary’s blindness is uncertain though not scarlet fever as described in the books, a couple of moves were conflated—but Laura changed or eliminated a number of what I could consider major items. Some were for dramatic effect, such as altering Jack’s fate to serve as a demarcation between childhood and adolescence leading up to maturity and adulthood; in the books, Jack dies of old age in the beginning of On Silver Lake while in reality he had, several years earlier, gone on with another family out to homestead while the Ingalls remained on Plum Creek. She was also a bit fuzzy in the novels about Almanzo’s age—the real Almanzo was ten years older than his wife, but in the novels he is merely “older” than she. I suspect this wide an age gap may have been more common or acceptable in the nineteenth century, when the man might feel the need to prove himself able to support a family before marrying. Laura, when writing for children, clearly felt it better to make the husband and wife closer in age to suit modern couples.
According to this biography and others2, Laura left out a number of items that didn’t suit her agenda of promoting and promulgating the All-American Ethos of Hard Work, based on a nation of self-sufficient independent farmers working for themselves. The fact that the family was fairly poor should come as no surprise to anyone who has read the books, but they weren’t always farmers, much less independent. Laura did mention Pa’s carpentry work to augment the family income, but Ma and Pa also ran a hotel in Burr Oak between farming stints during what would have been the Plum Creek years, and operated a butcher shop during this same time. Laura also did not mention her little brother, Freddie who was born while the family was on Plum Creek, as he died so shortly thereafter that he played no part in the family’s later fortunes.

Overall it’s a nice modern addition to the literature about Laura Ingalls Wilder3—a bestselling children’s author even seventy years after her books’ publication. . Her novels may serve as a gentle introduction to a period and place in American history with no wars or other significant events, and so therefore not much written about, but aren’t wholly factual about Laura’s own life. For all their flaws, not least racism, the Little House series is deservedly still part of any self-respecting public or school library’s collection of historical fiction. Consider this a folksy biography about a footnote author who lives on through her fictionalized memoirs, worth adding to collections which don’t have any of the earlier biographies, or where demand would indicate a need for something more up to date.

1I hope she will forgive the familiarity, as that’s how nigh onto the third generation of readers regards her; I’m sure Laura herself would by far prefer Mrs. A.J. Wilder…
2I’d want to double check for confirmation.
3there were several biographies written in the mid-1970s when the television show was airing

I'm behind schedule with book reviews, so I'm going to cheat and borrow a bit from my review of Prairie Fires.

Becoming Laura Ingalls Wilder is more than just a biography of Laura Ingalls. It encompasses U.S. history, politics, and social commentary from Laura Ingalls birth in 1867 to her death in 1957. If the book had ended with the Wilder's move to Rocky Ridge Farm, it would have been a 4 star read. Unfortunately, the remainder of the book (Parts 5 - 9) spend too much time focusing on Rose Wilder Lane and her unbalanced behavior, which I found far less interesting.

You might also enjoy:

Nonfiction
✱ The World of Laura Ingalls Wilder - highly recommended
✱ Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder
✱ The Selected Letters of Laura Ingalls Wilder
✱ The Children's Blizzard (about the blizzard in The Long Winter)

Fiction
✱ Caroline: Little House, Revisited

i'm a "Little House" freak, so naturally I liked it. Seemingly very well-researched (could this be a thesis-book?) the book was a bit dry and dull (as was life probably in early 1900), but it did paint the true picture of Laura Ingalls Wilder- a hardworking, simple farm woman with incredible strength and faith in her and her family's ability to "make it" wherever they went. Inspirational, really. If only I have half the fortitude Laura did, perhaps the age of sixty five isnt too old to become an author.

interesting background information on this wonderful children's author

Good, balanced account of both Laura's life and of her relationships with those around her. Of course, only her daughter kept a proper journal, so we only know from her side how Rose battled with her mother; we don't really know if it was reciprocated. Anyway, the credit for writing the "Little House" books is back to Laura.

I'm fascinated with LIW, especially this (relatively) new scholarship I've discovered on her. I have really enjoyed learning about her partnership with her daughter to write the books, her daughter's sense that her life has been a wasted failure (because she didn't consider that the work she did on her mother's books "counted" for anything). It's been fascinating to see how LIW flourished as she aged. And I think part of the charm is that the essential Laura-ness of her is still not captured -- the children's books are fiction, and she left little record of her private feelings, so there's always an unsatisfied feeling of wanting to KNOW LIW and not being able to capture her.