With Netflix’s reimagined Little House on the Prairie premiering July 9, a new generation of viewers is meeting Laura Ingalls Wilder’s frontier family for the first time. Wilder’s nine-volume series, published between 1932 and 1943 by Harper and Brothers (now HarperCollins), has sold tens of millions of copies and became a cornerstone of American children’s literature. But for many now-adult readers, Laura first arrived through Michael Landon’s long-running 1970s television adaptation—which borrowed her characters, rather than drawing on the books’ actual stories.
Author Pamela Smith Hill has been meeting Wilder, again and again, for more than fifty years, and her most recent book argues that the Little House novels deserve a clear-eyed reassessment different from what the ones their most devoted fans and harshest critics have offered.
Pamela Smith Hill
Too Good to Be Altogether Lost: Rediscovering Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House Books (University of Nebraska Press, 2025) is Hill’s third major study of Wilder. It follows Laura Ingalls Wilder: A Writer’s Life (South Dakota Historical Society Press, 2007) and the New York Times bestseller Pioneer Girl: The Annotated Autobiography (South Dakota Historical Society Press, 2014).
The book’s title quotes Wilder’s own words during a 1937 speech at the Detroit Book Fair, in which she declared her childhood stories were “too good to be altogether lost”. And these words resonate at a moment when Wilder’s reputation has never felt more contested. In June 2018, The American Library Association’s Association for Library Service to Children (ALSC), voted to remove Laura Ingalls Wilder’s name from its lifetime achievement award (formerly the Laura Ingalls Wilder Award), and to rename it the Children’s Literature Legacy Award. The reason? “Expressions of stereotypical attitudes” toward Indigenous peoples and people of colour in Wilder’s work. And yet Netflix’s new screen adaptation is poised to reintroduce her work to millions of viewers who may never have opened the disputed books in the first place.
Hill’s authority on the subject of Wilder is not only academic. She grew up roughly 40 miles from Rocky Ridge Farm in Mansfield, Missouri—where Wilder lived with her farmer husband Almanzo Wilder and wrote the Little House series. Hill discovered the books as a ten-year-old browsing a bookmobile in Missouri. “It was astounding to me that a farm woman from my part of the country could write such beautiful books,” she recalls. The discovery re-shaped her sense of who could become a writer: as a child, she had assumed that real writers “lived in New York, wore elegant suits, and smoked those cigarettes that had the long cigarette holders.” Surely, she assumed, they were remote and sophisticated people who were nothing like her neighbor Opal Scott, who first pressed a Wilder book into her hands.
Hill later moved to South Dakota, where she worked as a travel writer covering the state’s historic and literary sites. These include several prominent locations in De Smet, where the Ingalls family settled in 1879, and which serves as the backdrop for four of Wilder’s books: By the Shores of Silver Lake, The Long Winter, Little Town on the Prairie, and These Happy Golden Years —as well as the posthumously published The First Four Years.
Hill’s experiences during this period deepened her sense of Wilder as more than a regional children’s author: “I gained this new insight and new appreciation for her, and for her work as a writer”.
Confronting the difficult passages directly
During the 1970s and 1980s, Wilder’s Little House books were lauded as exemplary, award-winning examples of children’s literature. You could find them on the shelves of almost any school library in the US or Canada, and they were frequently read and discussed in classrooms studying North American history of the 1800s and 1900s. Then scholars began to take a closer look: at who is depicted in them, who is not, and how they are discussed.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, what they found was complicated—and included racist language and stereotyping of the Indigenous peoples whose land settlers like the Ingalls and Wilders were appropriating at scale. Too Good to Be Altogether Lost: Rediscovering Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House Books does not soften the racist language and settler-colonial framing that run through the series, particularly in Little House on the Prairie, which Hill names as the volume with “the most explosive material.”
Hill does try to bring balance, though. Her research shows that Wilder went to considerable lengths to get the historical setting right: for instance, she wrote letters to contacts in Kansas and even retraced old wagon routes with her daughter. “Wilder did everything she could at the time in the early 1930s to confirm that her depiction of the Osage’s diminished reserve was historically accurate,” Hill explains. “It’s just very painful for us to read right now.”
This tension—of attitudes that are authentic to their period, but uncomfortable to modern readers—sits at the centre of Hill’s argument against what she and other scholars call “presentism”: the habit of judging historical texts solely by contemporary standards. Some treat as disqualifying Charles Ingalls’ belief in Manifest Destiny, the 19th-century American ideology that the United States was divinely ordained by God to expand its democratic institutions and territory across the North American continent. Rejecting presentism, Hill argues instead that Charles Ingalls “is the conscience of the book. He believes in Manifest Destiny, but he also believes in the essential humanity of the people that he’s living with.”
And his capacity for moral complexity is repeatedly reinforced. Hill points to By the Shores of Silver Lake in particular: in it, Charles’ unease at the slaughter of the bison and his concern over the wolves disappearing from Dakota territory show evidence of “an awareness about the environment and how settlement is changing that world”—in this man who believes in Manifest Destiny.
Unflattening Wilder the villain or hero
This temptation to flatten a complicated figure into a simple villain or hero makes Wilder a lightning rod, argues Hill, who notes, “I do believe she’s held to a different standard, perhaps because she became so iconic.”
In today’s polarized times, this makes Wilder’s work ripe for the forces of historical revisionism: “I am worried that, in this political climate, a lot of the depth and a lot of the complexity of Wilder’s work will be erased and embraced in a new way that I find frightening,” Hill notes. She worries about Wilder’s demonization “by some factions of the far left,” but “even more” about “her being oversimplified by the far right.” She shakes her head: “It pains me deeply that we are oversimplifying writers, and we’re oversimplifying history, and we’re silencing different voices.”
Part of what makes Wilder so susceptible to this pull in either direction is the quality that makes her a great writer. “One of the hallmarks of a brilliant writer is that readers can find some reinforcement of their own ideas—no matter where they are on the political spectrum—in a writer’s work, and I think that is very definitely true of Wilder.”
When readers focus only on what reinforces their views, the result is that critical context goes missing. The aim of Hill’s book is to restore nuance and deepen our understanding, in order to move us past a one-dimensional understanding. As an example, she notes that “The real Ingalls family were part of a relatively progressive religious movement. They were part of the congregational church movement, which believed in suffrage”—and, she underlines, in abolitionism and education. These were decidedly reformist attitudes at the time. As further evidence of a certain liberalism, she points to the dedicated library at Rocky Ridge Farm in Mansfield, Missouri, where the young Wilder family moved in 1894 and where Wilder lived until her death in 1957. Such a collection of books would have been a distinct rarity for a farmhouse in Wright County, Missouri.
In the rush of presentism to condemn racist attitudes, “we have forgotten,” Hill avers, “that Wilder—for her time and place, and the world she created—was leaning more toward the progressive side. That, too, might help readers in the 21st century better understand Wilder’s approach to the past.”
A hopeful eye on Netflix … and a way to read Little House in 2026
Given her trepidation about adaptation and appropriation, Hill’s reaction to the impending Netflix series is optimistic. She contrasts the new production with the Michael Landon-era series of the 1970s, which she believes did lasting damage to how readers understand Wilder politically: “I think in part, that the Michael Landon Little House on the Prairie series cemented a tie—and an assumption—that Wilder was inherently a conservative kind of right-wing writer,” Hill notes. Michael Landon’s approach “gave us much more simplified storylines than what Wilder actually presented in her books,” she adds. And her corrective for skeptical longtime fans is simple: “go back and re-read the books, and see that the world Wilder presents is much more complicated and much more complex than what they grew to love” in the Landon series.
When it comes to the new adaptation, she is direct: “I hope that it captures the original spirit of the books.” And she is, in fact, “very hopeful about the series”—optimism that seems well-founded. Where the original 1974 series featured Osage characters only in the pilot episode, this version makes the fictional Mitchell family—an Osage household living alongside the Ingalls Family—central to the narrative, rather than just a backdrop element. According to CBC News, the production brought on Osage cultural consultant Julie O’Keefe (who also worked on the film Killers of the Flower Moon) to guide costumes, hair, makeup, and set decoration. And University of Kansas literature professor Robert Warrior served as a story consultant, helping the writers’ room ground the Osage storylines in historical context.
This corrective impulse—centering the missing Indigenous perspective, rather than treating it as simple scenery—is something Hill advocates for not just on screen, but in real-world education and discussion. Our focused and candid conversation about this clearly stuck with her, for just a few hours later, she sent an email with a further recommendation: “I often recommend that families seek out books by Native American authors to pair with this book,” she wrote. “Louise Erdrich’s Birchbark House series is a perfect pairing. Virginia Driving Hawk Sneve’s non-fiction and fiction books are good choices, too, although they don’t necessarily correspond to Wilder’s nineteenth-century setting.” (And I’ll note here that Canadian readers can pair the books with katherena vermette’s A Girl Called Echo series, set across the same nineteenth-century Prairie history from an Indigenous perspective, or David A. Robertson’s 7 Generations, which extends that story from the 1800s through to the residential school era and the present.)
New archival discoveries in this celebrated new page-turner
Beyond the cultural argument, Too Good to Be Altogether Lost builds directly on scholarly groundwork that Hill laid a decade ago in Pioneer Girl: The Annotated Autobiography, her critically acclaimed and annotated edition of Wilder’s original, unpublished memoir. That earlier research turned up a detail that Hill hadn’t previously registered: Pa had sold Jack—the beloved brindle bulldog who appears across four of the Little House novels—before the family even left the Osage reserve. “I discovered that Pa had sold Jack before they left,” recalls Hill. “I was shocked, because I thought Jack followed them all the way through. I realized then that Jack is a fictional character in the Little House series.”
Though this was “a small thing”, it reaffirmed her sense of Wilder as “a gifted storyteller”, as did her most significant find. It concerns The First Four Years, the unfinished final volume of the Little House series, which focuses on the early years of Laura’s marriage. Hill had long accepted biographer Roger MacBride’s assessment that Wilder wrote The First Four Years in the 1940s, patterning it after her daughter Rose Wilder Lane’s 1933 novel Let the Hurricane Roar. In fact, Hill had repeated the theory in her earlier book Laura Ingalls Wilder: A Writer’s Life. But references in Wilder’s correspondence to an unfinished “adult novel” nagged at her, and a tip from fellow scholar William Anderson sent her to look once more at Wilder’s original manuscript.
While unable to travel to the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library during the COVID-19 pandemic, Hill connected with archivists, who located a date that confirmed Wilder drafted the novel in 1932 and early 1933—a full year before Lane’s book appeared. “And for me, that was the major find for this book.” The revised dating reverses the assumed direction of influence, undercutting the long-standing theory that Wilder borrowed from her daughter’s fiction, rather than the other way around.
But Hill is careful to credit Lane’s editorial gifts: “She helped Wilder with a question of voice, and where to start a novel and where to end a novel. She’s very good with plot,” she notes. “What I think ironic is that, while Rose Wilder Lane provided great editorial advice to her mother, she was not able to apply this editorial knowledge to her own fiction: “You can see that brilliant artistic spark just isn’t there in Lane’s work.” Despite her success in the 1920s, Hill argues that, by the 1930s, Lane was “struggling to find stories to tell, and if she hadn’t lifted material from her mother’s unpublished Pioneer Girl [which was also a source for Wilder’s The First Four Years], I don’t know that Rose Wilder Lane would have had a further career.”
Too Good to Be Altogether Lost
The critical reception for Too Good to Be Altogether Lost has cemented Hill’s reputation as a preeminent Wilder scholar. The book was named a 2025 Choice Outstanding Academic Title, and the Washington Post used it as an analytical anchor for a wider analysis of why the Little House series remains both beloved and troubling.
And here, let me add a personal observation. In addition its merited scholarly heft, Too Good to Be Altogether Lost is, quite simply, an excellent read. It has the pull of a page-turner, so I am confident that longtime admirers of Wilder and Little House and newcomers alike will find it hard to put down. And this makes me optimistic that Hill’s larger hopes for the book can be realized. For she hopes to reach—and activate—an audience beyond the community of Wilder scholars: “I really hope that in the long run, a book like Too Good to Be Altogether Lost will encourage readers not just to rediscover Wilder,” she affirms, “but to rediscover a whole world: a whole canon of American and world literature that perhaps they’ve forgotten about.”
Whether Netflix’s new Ingalls family will also send viewers back to Wilder’s lost books, which Hill has spent a career studying and defending, has yet to be seen. But Hill will be watching the show—and its viewers—with hope.
© Arpita Ghosal, Sesaya Arts Magazine 2026
