Between 1932 and 1942 Laura Ingalls Wilder (1867-1957) published a steady stream of books recording her girlhood memories of frontier life, beginning with the passage of the Homestead Act of 1862, which enabled settlers to obtain "free land in exchange for their labor." Editors at Harper and Brothers hoped that her first book, Little House in the Big Woods (1932), would be the "miracle book that no depression could stop," and their hopes were not disappointed: it was chosen as a Junior Literary Guild selection, and sales were brisk. This first success was followed by a stream of others: Farmer Boy (1933), Little House on the Prairie (1935), On the Banks of Plum Creek (1937), By the Shores of Silver Lake (1939), The Long Winter (1940), Little Town on the Prairie (1941), and These Happy Golden Years (1943) became critically acclaimed best-sellers. Five of her books became Newbery Honor books; a branch library in...