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Laura Ingalls Wilder is one of the most influential children’s authors in American history. Her vibrant retelling of episodes from her childhood in the world-famous Little House historical fiction series helped shape the popular idea of the American frontier.

The vivid details and realistic characters of the Little House series helped bring to life Laura’s experience on the American frontier. Aside from having multiple libraries, reading rooms, and elementary schools named after her, Wilder’s books can still be found on library and elementary school reading lists all over the country.

Over the course of her long life—she lived from 1867 to 1957—Wilder would traverse “all the successive phases of the frontier,” as she put it, traveling by covered wagon, homesteading, and settling a raw railroad town on the Great Plains. Decades later, she would fly across country in an airplane. [From Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder by Caroline Fraser]

 Fun Fact:

Through her great-grandmother, Margaret Delano Ingalls, Wilder was related to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, whom she loathed. Wilder was a Democrat for years but along with other rural farmers grew sharply critical of the New Deal, calling Truman a “liar” and wishing that Eleanor Roosevelt would have to scrub her own floors. She apparently never learned of the connection and for the rest of her life supported conservative politicians and causes.

And Another

And did you know this:

As a child, Wilder survived a cloud of 3.5 trillion locusts. In the mid-1870s, Laura witnessed one of the most devastating natural disasters the country had ever known—a locust plague that caused an estimated $116 billion worth of damage from the Dakotas to Texas, pushing thousands of settlers to the brink of starvation and ruin, including her own family. The Rocky Mountain locust was the culprit: the only swarming grasshopper species in the U.S. and Canada. It went extinct around 1902 for reasons that have never been explained.

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