Laura Ingalls Wilder Biography Quotes 23 Report mistakes

Early Life
Laura Elizabeth Ingalls Wilder was born on February 7, 1867, in Pepin County, Wisconsin, to Charles Phillip Ingalls and Caroline Lake Ingalls. She grew up with sisters Mary, Carrie, and Grace, and an infant brother, Charles Frederick, who died in infancy. Her childhood unfolded against the shifting line of American settlement after the Civil War, and the rhythms of her family life were those of subsistence farming, carpentry, and seasonal labor as her father followed opportunity on the expanding frontier. The Ingalls family embodied perseverance and thrift, qualities that shaped Laura's character and later work.

Frontier Migrations and Homesteading
In Laura's early years the family moved frequently. They lived for a time on the Kansas prairie near Independence, returned to Wisconsin, and later settled in Walnut Grove, Minnesota. A difficult period in Burr Oak, Iowa, where they helped manage a hotel, underscored the precariousness of frontier life. By the late 1870s the Ingallses moved to the Dakota Territory, near De Smet, drawn by the coming of the railroad and the promise of homestead land. There, amidst harsh winters, failed crops, and the camaraderie of scattered neighbors, Laura came of age. The severe winter of 1880, 1881, with blizzards that halted trains and threatened food supplies, left a deep impression that she would later transform into narrative.

Education and Early Work
Schooling for Laura was intermittent, dictated by weather, distance, and the demands of work. When illness left her older sister Mary blind, Laura assumed more responsibilities at home. Determined to contribute to the family's support, she studied diligently, earned a teaching certificate at 16, and taught in one-room schools near De Smet. She boarded with local families and learned to balance classroom duties with domestic expectations. The experience honed her discipline, sharpened her observational skills, and acquainted her with the speech, customs, and hardships of her community, details that would later give her prose its authenticity.

Marriage and Hardship
Laura married Almanzo James Wilder in August 1885. They began married life in the Dakota Territory on claims worked under homestead laws that rewarded persistence and improvement of the land. Their daughter, Rose, was born in 1886; a son died in infancy. Repeated misfortunes tested the young couple: diphtheria struck the household, leaving Almanzo with lingering weakness; a house fire and crop failures compounded setbacks. Seeking a healthier climate and fresh prospects, they tried a brief stay in Florida, returned to De Smet, and in 1894 set out by wagon to Mansfield, Missouri, where they hoped better soils and a longer growing season would sustain them.

Rocky Ridge Farm and Community Life
In Mansfield they established Rocky Ridge Farm, gradually transforming rough acreage into a diversified operation with orchards, poultry, and dairying. Laura kept meticulous accounts, learned modern farm methods, and participated in civic and agricultural organizations. She became a voice for rural families through journalism, contributing from 1911 to the Missouri Ruralist, where her practical essays and columns offered advice on home management, citizenship, and the dignity of farm life. Her clear, direct style and steady moral outlook won readers who recognized their own struggles in her words.

Turning to Books
In her early sixties, encouraged by her daughter Rose Wilder Lane, herself a professional writer, Laura began shaping childhood memories into narrative form. A first, unpublished memoir, often referred to as a pioneer-girl narrative, provided the raw material. Recasting those recollections for younger readers, she produced Little House in the Big Woods (1932), followed by a sequence that traced the Ingalls family's moves and her own path to adulthood: Farmer Boy (about Almanzo's boyhood in New York), By the Shores of Silver Lake, The Long Winter, Little Town on the Prairie, and These Happy Golden Years, among others, as well as Little House on the Prairie, which centered on the family's time in Kansas. The books were published by Harper & Brothers and were initially illustrated by Helen Sewell; later editions by Garth Williams brought a new visual identity that broadened their appeal.

Craft, Collaboration, and Voice
Wilder's prose is spare, episodic, and attentive to work, churning butter, twisting hay, setting fence, reciting lessons by lamplight. Her scenes turn on small triumphs and dangers, and her characters are anchored by the affection and moral steadiness of her parents, Charles and Caroline. The extent of Rose Wilder Lane's editorial role has been debated; what is clear is that daughter and mother collaborated closely in revising, structuring, and preparing the manuscripts for publication. The resulting books balanced immediacy with clarity, offering young readers a coherent arc out of a life marked by frequent moves and adversity.

Reception and Cultural Impact
The Little House books found an audience during the Great Depression and after, when readers sought stories of resilience. They became staples of American children's literature, translated into many languages and read in schools and homes across generations. Adaptations amplified their reach; most notably, a long-running television series in the 1970s and 1980s introduced the characters to millions of viewers, even as it took liberties with events. The stories helped define a popular image of the American frontier, self-reliant families, austere landscapes, and a moral education grounded in work and neighborliness.

Later Years
With the success of her books, Wilder continued to live modestly at Rocky Ridge Farm. She corresponded with readers, tended her home, and guarded the practical virtues that had steered her life. Almanzo Wilder died in 1949. Laura Ingalls Wilder died on February 10, 1957, in Mansfield, Missouri, at the age of 90. Their home became a site of literary pilgrimage, preserved as a museum that holds manuscripts, letters, and everyday objects familiar to readers of the series.

Legacy and Reappraisal
Wilder's legacy is complex and enduring. Her narratives celebrate courage, thrift, and family love, and they preserve details of nineteenth-century domestic and agricultural life with unusual vividness. At the same time, scholars and readers have scrutinized the books for their portrayals of Native Americans and other marginalized people, noting language and attitudes that reflect the prejudices of their time. In 2018, the American Library Association renamed the Laura Ingalls Wilder Award as the Children's Literature Legacy Award in response to those concerns. The discussion has prompted new editions, contextual essays, and teaching approaches that situate the books within their historical moment.

Enduring Significance
Laura Ingalls Wilder transformed a life shaped by migration, scarcity, and hard work into literature that invites readers to imagine both the beauty and the burden of frontier life. The most important people around her, her parents, Charles and Caroline; her sisters, Mary, Carrie, and Grace; her husband, Almanzo; and her daughter, Rose, are inseparable from her achievement, not simply as characters but as collaborators in the experiences and memories she preserved. Her work remains a touchstone for conversations about memory, myth, and the making of American identity, even as readers continue to find in her pages the warmth of a lamp-lit home against the winter dark.

Our collection contains 23 quotes who is written by Laura, under the main topics: Motivational - Ethics & Morality - Love - Work Ethic - Nature.

Other people realated to Laura: Michael Landon (Actor), David Rose (Musician)