[dedrabirzer]

Hi Amy,
First, apologies for taking forever to answer you! I hope you were able to complete the course and that you continued to enjoy it! I just visited last weekend the LIW sites at De Smet, Walnut Grove, and Burr Oak, IA.

I’m not a huge fan of Fraser’s Prairie Fires. She made accusations against Rose that simply had no basis in fact and she barely disguised her contempt for Rose. I don’t think she like Laura all that much either. This lack of objectivity makes me question much of the book. Fraser is completely wrong about farming in South Dakota, too. The best review of Prairie Fires is by John E. Miller in Midwestern Review, Spring 2020. I’ve heard from Wilder scholars that Fraser treated them and especially the folks who run the LIW home sites very poorly. So I’m not a big fan. That isn’t to say that there isn’t anything of value in the book, though.

Happy reading!
Dedra

[dedrabirzer]

Hi Kara — I’m so slow about answering these posts! Apologies. I have this book, but I haven’t read past the introduction. It seemed to me that the author uses “libertarian” as a pejorative term, and I just haven’t had the heart to pick up yet another smear campaign against Laura and Rose. I do need to read it, though, so will report back when I do. Did you end up reading it?

I did just read a little book on Mary Ingalls years at the Iowa College for the Blind. That was quite good. And I highly recommend a novel about Rose by Susan Wittig Albert.

Best,
Dedra

[dedrabirzer]

Kara, I apologize for being so tardy in responding to you! I hope the last 2 books of the series (not including The First Four Years) were a good counterweight to the heaviness of The Long Winter! I do believe that part of Wilder’s literary genius is her ability to impart the experience of living through extreme events to her readers. The reader feels the monotony and dullness of that long winter, and even the hunger and cold as well (particularly for you in Idaho!). Similarly, Wilder’s writing makes the reader hear and feel the grasshopper swarms in On the Banks of Plum Creek and hear the pounding of the Osage war drums in Little House in the Prairie.

I just finished teaching a college honors course on Wilder’s writing, in which we read all of the novels in succession. The students had similar comments to yours about The Long Winter, enhanced I’m sure by the very long and cold winter that we had in Michigan.

Thanks for your interest in this course!

Dedra Birzer

[dedrabirzer]

That’s a great question. Thanks for asking! The first 2 episodes are background info, then each book gets an episode (the last 2 get 2 episodes) and the course ends with 2 wrap-up episodes. I go through each book pretty thoroughly — lots of spoilers! You can certainly do the course without re-reading the books, and get a lot out of it. But as someone who has read the Little House series many times over, I heartily recommend re-reading. They are a quick read. As I tell my college students, it’s not like you’re reading Aristotle! You can definitely read along with the course, watching the episode that corresponds to each book when you get to it. I’d love to hear what you end up deciding to do and how it goes!

[dedrabirzer]

Hi Individualist,
I apologize for taking so long to answer your question. I did not realize it was here waiting for me!

I encourage you to read the Little House books. They are so much better than the Michael Landon tv series! Very few of the tv episodes come from the books, just to warn you.

By Hayekian perspective, I’m referring to Friedrich Hayek’s notion of the Fatal Conceit and to his understanding of success and failure. Many of the scholarly works on Wilder take her to task for presenting Pa as anything but a failure as a farmer/homesteader. And early in their marriage, Laura and Almanzo experienced disaster after disaster as farmers. What these scholars ignore, however, is the essential role that failure plays in human learning, as Hayek argues. Liberty enables farmers (in this case) to take risks, and to learn from failure as well as from success. The Fatal Conceit in this case is the all-knowing arrogance that faults farmers for taking those risks, that says farmers should follow the “experts” with their dehumanizing 5 year plans. Indeed, by exercising their freedom to be independent and by taking the lumps that may well come with that independence, homesteader farmers like Pa reveal much about human dignity and resilience. Hope that makes sense!

Best wishes,
Dedra Birzer

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