The Long Winter

The Long Winter is the sixth of Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House books, published in 1940 and based on her childhood in the Dakota Territory.

The book is set in southeastern Dakota Territory during the winter of 1880 to 1881, when Laura was fourteen years old. After an October blizzard the family moves from its claim shanty into the town of De Smet, where a man has predicted seven months of bad weather, and the prediction proves accurate. The trains stop running, the supplies held in the town are used up, and blizzard follows blizzard, cutting households off from one another and from the coal and food they depend on. The family survives on what it has stored, on the fuel that can be twisted out of hay, and on the stubbornness of a town with no other option.

Wilder describes scarcity plainly and from a child's point of view, so the drama of the book comes from hunger, cold and the long wait rather than from any single event. It was a runner-up for the Newbery Medal.