This website is designed to provide information and resources to scholars and readers interested in Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House books, enduring favourites of American children's literature, and their derivatives. In addition to Wilder's eight original novels published between 1932 and 1943, the "Little House" name and myth have extended to a number of spin-off series, abridgements, rediscovered writings, and biographies for both children and adults. Scholars who have taken up Wilder's oeuvre have examined its proscriptions of gender, race, capitalism, and the American dream, as well as its crucial role in the colonial project of the nineteenth century; this scholarship can be found in either book-length studies or a range of journal articles, book chapters, and shorter studies.

New!!: A new monograph by Anita Clair Fellman, Little House, Long Shadow: Laura Ingalls Wilder's Impact on American Culture, will be published in June 2008 by University of Missouri Press. More information will be posted here once it becomes available.

New!!: HarperCollins has published two additions to the larger "Little House" saga in 2007: Nellie Oleson Meets Laura Ingalls by Heather Williams and Mary Ingalls on Her Own by Elizabeth Kimmel Willard. The first two books in each of the spin-off series—the Rose Years, the Caroline Years, the Charlotte Years, the Martha Years—have been rereleased in abridged form in 2007, with the third book in each series following in January 2008 and the fourth book in each series following in May 2008.

About the Site Owner

Benjamin Lefebvre is a SSHRC postdoctoral fellow in the Department of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta. He has published on several aspects of children's literature and culture.