Great Plains Studies, Center for
Date of this Version
1995
Abstract
The Little House books by Laura Ingalls Wilder have many devoted readers, and the TV program based loosely on the books has generated many more enthusiasts who have never even read the books. One measure of such fans' interest has been their pilgrimages to the sites and settings of the books, and around these locations has grown up a considerable tourist industry of museums, pageants, and historical reconstruction. Here the faithful or the merely curious can find a certain kind of ratification of their fictional experience: the "fiction" is raised toward "history" and hence toward "truth" by conflating the stories of long ago into the settings and artifacts that survive into the present. In its most sophisticated form, such a pilgrimage results in the scholarship that attempts to recover the historical context out of which great stories arise-and, in the reflex of this impulse, the attempt to discriminate between the story and the history out of which it has grown.
Comments
Published in Great Plains Quarterly 15:3 (Summer 1995). Copyright © 1995 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln.