Quotes from Caroline Fraser

Often, if you want to write about women in history," the novelist Hilary Mantel has said, "you have to distort history to do it, or substitute fantasy for facts; you have to pretend that individual women were more important than they were or that we know more about them than we do."8 But when it comes to Wilder, we don't have to pretend.

The salt water tingled my feet and made them feel so good all the rest of the day, and just to think, the same water that bathes the shores of China and Japan came clear across the ocean and bathed my feet.

the only manuscripts in her entire career that had required no editing, "no repeat absolutely no editorial suggestions from me or anyone else," were Wilder's and E. B. White's.

During the darkest days, a saying took hold in Kansas: "there is no god west of Salina.

The locust plague constituted the worst and most widespread natural disaster the country had ever seen, causing an estimated $200 million in damage to western agriculture (the equivalent of $116 billion today) and threatening millions of farmers in remote locations—far from social services in the cities—with starvation.

I realize with regret that my report is not as complete as it should be," she wrote, "and had fully intended to do better, but we are told that good intentions make excellent paving stones.

Scientists estimate that it took a thousand years for an inch of topsoil to accumulate on the arid high plains. It was the work of a moment to blow it away. Topsoil exposed by the disc plows turned to dust, and the dust began to eddy, roil, and lift on the wind. "Rolling dusters," they were called, or "black blizzards." There were fourteen of them in 1932. The year after that, thirty-eight.

Three weird sisters in an antifeminist trifecta, they each celebrated in their books the strapping male as a hero, and exhibited a striking dissociation from what was happening around the world.

Such magic there is in Christmas to draw the absent ones home and if unable to go in the body the thoughts will hover there.

In the peculiar alchemy of literature, the daughter was adept at creating in fiction what she had not known in her own childhood.

I think we receive a great deal what we expect in this world. -Laura Ingalls Wilder

Sweet By and By,

Eventually settlers grew to be like the Indians themselves, she remarked. Westerners such as her family, she said, were "frontiersmen," so accustomed to an unrelenting succession of wilderness hazards that it "made us … apathetic. I can't get the right word for it. Indians were like that you know and they lived under nearly the same conditions."51 Those conditions determined the attitude, she seemed to be saying, not culture or color of skin.

She praised his 'agricultural theology', having long ago taken such advice as gospel: don't go looking for a better place "but MAKE one.

Later in life, children are often reluctant for a host of reasons to assume responsibility over their parents, a reversal of roles that symbolizes mortality.

We were just two wild Indians... on our own and no though of its being wrong. You must not have us treated like children of today. It would spoil the i picture and the interest..' Children back then, she wrote, 'weren't raised to be helpless cowards.' -Laura Ingalls Wilder

One scholar has estimated that a third of Dakota homesteads were held by women a decade later.

The Wilders, of course, paid no attention to her exuberance, continuing to live a frugal existence among their pigs and hens, entertained by a self-re-newing circle of farm cats and their preternaturally gifted Airedale terrier, Nero, who would sit politely at the dinner table like a member of the family, eating off his own plate.

There was no description of the years in town, of supplementing farm income with wages, or of the anxiety engendered by poverty.

South Dakota's new constitution forbade the appropriation of public money to provide relief.

Their school was taught by William Masters's brother, Samuel Masters, whom the children called "Uncle Sam." He was a tall, thin, bald man with bad breath and a worrying habit of fondling girls' hands. Laura protected herself by concealing a pin in her fingers and stabbing him with it. After that, she said, he left her alone.

Fundamentally, the question was whether national decisions of significant economic import, affecting thousands of citizens, would be governed by Enlightenment science or by huckster fantasy. The outcome was immediately clear to anyone reading the newspapers: fantasy won.

As Little Crow had said, 'When men are hungry, they help themselves.

regulate interest rates charged on bank loans.98