Laura Ingalls Wilder

Laura as a very old woman (on top)
and Laura as very young woman.

Laura Ingalls Wilder wrote many great books about her childhood. She was raised on the American prairie as a pioneer girl. She had a sister named Mary that was two years older than her. She and her sister called their parents Ma and Pa as nick names for their real names, Caroline and Charles. 
 
 Laura and her family moved and moved to many different places until they came to a happy home where her little sister was born. Ma and Pa named her new sister Carrie. The family soon moved to a little house that Pa  had built, with yellow pine boards, glass windows, and china doorknobs. Laura had never seen such a fine house. But In the summer grasshoppers invaded the land and ate the wheat. Then more trouble followed. Laura's baby brother Freddie died soon after he was born because Pa couldn't take care of  him without money. But even so they were cheered by the sweet melody of Pa's fiddle. The family had to move many times afterward.

 One winter Mary caught a fever and lost eyesight. Laura had to make pictures in words to tell Mary what she would see if she hadn't caught the fever.
  
Finally, they  moved to a place called De Smet. Pa promised Ma they would not have to move again.

As a young woman Laura became a teacher and married a man named Almanzo Wilder  in 1885.  (She called this man Manly.) A year later their daughter, Rose, was born.

When Laura was much older and Rose was an adult and a newspaper reporter, Laura needed something to do, so she told her daughter to edit her first story of her childhood. Rose agreed and so, in 1932 Laura's first book Little House in the Big woods was published. She wrote seven more books about her childhood. Laura's books were very famous and well written.

Laura Ingalls Wilder died at the age of ninety in 1957. She once said she wrote her books because,"I want children now to understand more about the beginnings of things, to know what is behind the things they see, what it is that made America as they Know it."