Review of Becoming Laura Ingalls Wilder: The Woman behind the Legend by John E. Miller

Authors

Ann Romines, George Washington University

Date of this Version

1999

Document Type

Article

Comments

Published in Great Plains Quarterly 19:4 (Fall 1999). Copyright © 1999 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

Abstract

Since Laura Ingalls Wilder's fictionalized biography, as the Little House series, has become one of the long-running hits of US popular culture, it is surprising for most readers to realize that the actual woman is a little-known figure. Reticent, determined, and deeply committed to propriety, Wilder had many friends in the small town where she lived for the last fifty-some years of her life, but few intimates beyond her husband and one daughter. Thus John E. Miller's scrupulous new biography of Wilder is a valuable and absorbing book. Miller's aim was to write "a biography describing and explaining the lived life," and he has largely succeeded.