”the Days were short and cold,” begins the chapter ”Mr. Edwards meets santa claus”. Sisters Laura and Mary keep themselves near the fireplace and wondering how santa claus should be able to take over the rising the river to their little log cabin on the Kansasprärien.
he can’t – he’s too thick – but he meets the family’s neighbor, mr. Edwards, who swims across the river with the children’s christmas gifts. Was his tennmugg may, and a candy cane, a heart-shaped cake and a sparkling pennymynt. ”Never before had there been such a christmas”, Laura Ingalls Wilder, writing almost 70 years later.
been able to create such a warm, längtansvärd idyll of a reality so affected, tiring, hard and painful. For such was her upbringing. It is stated by one of the great reading experiences, ” Prairie fire: The American dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder” by Caroline Fraser, the book that received the Pulitzer prize as the best biography.
”Little house”books are full of small glittering barndomspärlor; beloved dolls, play with the faithful dog Jack, the exciting excursions with my dad and swimming in the Plommonån. There is also work, and hazard, but the blows quickly pass by or overcome with hard work and a bold heart.
The happiness was short and thin. Everyday was crop failure, drudgery, poor weather conditions, dirt, cold, next to starvation. Gräshoppssvärmen, which puts worries in the book series was, in reality, the biggest in the history of the world; a quarter of the united states devastated by the insects ‘ jaws and people went mad when the devourer climbed on them and devoured clothes green threads.
For the family Ingalls, as well as for the vast majority of pioneers who, during the 1800s second part created history and myth by pressing to the westward, life was a living hell. The country was not fruitful. Cultivation practices depleted the soil and created both contemporary and future environmental disasters. The culmination would come in the gigantic dammstormarna, the ”dust bowl”, much later. Those who has been immortalized in other popular culture, especially of the singer Woody Guthrie and John Steinbeck with his novel ”the grapes of Wrath”.
worn and the hunger bites Laura up and go forward – both for the child as the married young woman and the aged author. It is in the middle of dammstormen as her literary works starting to take shape. She is the constant pionjärflickan as all of life retains a mentality that goes through both her fictional works and the biography about her.
She describes her parents ‘ tribulations with these sentences: ”When it was possible they did something good of the evil. When it was not possible hardened the out.” Her attitude to life, which she often repeated, could be summarized with a few keywords: honesty, good humor, endurance, helpfulness, kindness, and perhaps, above all, autonomy and independence.
today it is hard to think of anything more anachronistic.
”Never before had there been such a christmas”, Laura Ingalls Wilder, writing almost 70 years later.
I have strong memories of the ”Little house”suite. I read it myself as a child, and for my own twenty years later. ”Prairie fires” gives one aha experience after the other. You can mention the Ingalls special form of feminism, her deep distrust of the authorities and the many conflicts with her daughter, whose influence over her writing was solid.
is worth a separattext with his writing, his friendship with liberalikonen Ayn Rand, his flirtation with fascism and anti-semitism and its influence on the contemporary cultural scene.
However, you do not need to write much about the tv series, which aired between 1974 and 1983. It barely makes Caroline Fraser, either, except to note that the director/star Michael Landon liked to show the breast, drove kalsonglöst during westernbyxan and between takes gladly swept the bourbon brand Wild turkey. Best forgotten, this series.
But the books will never be forgotten. They give the impression that Laura Ingalls Wilder grew up on the prairie. In fact, he lived with his family in the so-called indianterritoriet in Kansas barely more than a year. Such a short time and Laura was just four years old. Yet she managed to experience the whole wild west myth – multiple, conflicts between the settlers and the indigenous people, präriebränder, cowboys – and let it shape her for life.
Even as the 88-year-old slept Laura Ingalls Wilder with a shotgun within easy reach.
