Thanks for that!

Fuck that. It was published by Oprah? The richest woman on the planet and she can't afford a goddamn editor? I first became wary with the sentence:

It seemed a good time to read the series I'd known as the Little House on the Prairie books, written by Laura Ingalls Wilder.

The books she'd known. Most others had known them as something else, but she's known them as the Little House on the Prairie Books. Fucking hell.

I read on, made it as far as the first sentence on the second page, but I had to stop. I'm not a great writer. I don't have a college degree. I'm no professional. However, if some piece of shit heart-tugging slimefest I farted out one night while drunk were to garner the attention of motherfucking Oprah's national magazine, I'd make sure as all hellfire that someone hired a halfway literate editor.

Fuck that piece for 17 reasons.

I took Howe's poetry seminar at the suggestion of one of my instructors at Emerson (She was living in Cambridge at the time). She wouldn't let me read my own poems (turning them over to someone who read them in the affected "poetry voice") and told me what I was writing "wasn't poetry"....though it got me admitted to Iowa.

In general, the male instructors I've had tend to like my work better than the women.

Don't hold back, item, tell us how you really feel :D

The Ingalls family did survive that long winter (although I was so worried they wouldn't I read ahead one night while my daughter slept).

LIES! The rest of the series is LIES!

Hey, I really liked this article, too. I love the books and have read them many times and think of them often. I even read the series to my class aloud when I was a primary grades teacher. They're powerful. And I love how people really are responding to the financial setbacks of this recession with creativity and finding ways to rebuild community.

One interesting thing about those books does have a bearing on today's financial world. Laura Ingalls Wilder herself was a sort of so-so writer - pretty basic and mechanical - she had written columns about being a farm wife for the local paper and stuff like that. The books were shaped profoundly by her editor, her own daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, a writer, PR person, and ghostwriter, also an interesting character who became an early Libertarian and spent a lot of time writing and agitating against government supports and socialism.

That ideology led her to alter a lot of the facts in the book. In real life, the Ingalls family had accepted government 'handouts' in the form of cash, land, and food, and had relied on government programs and disbursements to get through some of the harder times. From manuscript analysis, it seems that Rose edited a lot of that out, and shaped the stories to depict the family as more self-sufficient and their communities as more independent from the federal and state governments than they really were. This book details the contributions of Rose to the Little House books and is a really fascinating read.

Nice article, though. They're still great stories and they resonate with people at times of need, as great literature should.