Stories Kept for Sixty Years

Laura Ingalls Wilder grew up in a pioneer family in the American Midwest in the 1870s and 1880s. Her family moved by covered wagon through Wisconsin, Kansas, Minnesota and the Dakota Territory, living in log cabins, a dugout and claim shanties.

As an adult she settled on a farm in Missouri with her husband, Almanzo. In her forties she began writing columns about farm and home life for a regional newspaper. She was learning the craft of writing slowly, piece by piece.

In her sixties, encouraged by her daughter Rose, who was a professional writer, she began to set down the stories of her childhood. The first book, Little House in the Big Woods, was published in 1932, when Wilder was sixty-five.

It was the beginning of a whole series. Over the following decade she wrote the rest of the Little House books, which have since been read by generations of children around the world. The memories she had carried for half a century had become a body of work. The years had not used up her material. They had ripened it.