Happy 150th Birthday, Laura Ingalls Wilder!

I consider the first “romance” novel I ever read (and loved) to be These Happy Golden Years. Even though I knew it was wrong at the time, because I’d read the books on my own by the time I was in elementary school when it was on in the late 1970s, I loved the Little House on the Prairie TV show—to the point that I loved wearing long skirts and pretending like my backyard was the prairie and I was a little pioneer girl. (I sort of was. We lived in the “Wild West”—Las Cruces, New Mexico—when I was growing up.)

Even into adulthood, I continued to learn more about LIW, the Ingalls family, and their travels. I have several biographies, a few collections of her nonfiction writing, and even a book that’s a collection of the writings of Pa, Ma, Mary, Carrie, and Grace Ingalls.

But as with most things that we love as children/young adults, as I grew older, the love for this author/series fell to the wayside as other loves came into my life (other authors, like Jane Austen; my own writing). But LIW was always there—all of those books on their own designated shelf in my office.

And then a few years ago, the book Pioneer Girl: The Annotated Autobiography came out. It took me a couple of years to get around to it, but last year, since I hadn’t re-read the LH series in many, many years, I decided it was time. I read the annotated memoir alongside the original series and recalled again why it was such a huge part of my development.