Little House on the Prairie

Little House on the Prairie is an autobiographical children's novel by Laura Ingalls Wilder, published in 1935. It follows Little House in the Big Woods and covers the months the family spent in Montgomery County, Kansas, travelling from Wisconsin in a covered wagon to a site on the open prairie.

The book is full of the practical work of making a home from nothing: the log house Pa builds, the well he digs, the hunting and the corn and the dugout in the creek bank, and the family's encounters with the Osage whose land they are living on. Wilder also writes the discomfort of that position, and the novel ends with the family moving on again when the government orders the settlers off.

Wilder wrote the series in the 1930s from her own memories, and this volume is the best known of them. Its narrator is a child recording what the adults around her do, which leaves the political arrangement of the frontier in the background and keeps the work of one family in the foreground.