Pulitzer Surprise

Santa Fe's Caroline Fraser just won the Pulitzer Prize. Her 2017 book, Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder, is an examination of the real life of the author of the Little House on the Prairie series.

The Pulitzer committee called it a "deeply researched and elegantly written portrait" of Wilder's devotion to idealized self-reliance, despite challenges and failures which never graced the pages of the books.

Fraser will deliver the keynote address at the sold-out New Mexico Press Women's annual banquet on Saturday night at the Lodge at Santa Fe. She spoke to SFR after returning home from the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books last weekend.

How did you find out and what was your reaction? Were you watching the announcements online like the rest of us?
I was not watching. I was kind of aware that it was happening, but I wasn't exactly sure what time it was. (Laughs) So, I was in my office doing something else. But my husband, in his office, was watching and saw it. He came to my office door with kind of a funny look on his face and said, 'You just won the Pulitzer Prize.' It was quite surprising. Shocking, even. (Fraser's publisher submitted the Pulitzer nomination on her behalf.)

How does this—or does it—change things for you?
I hope it brings the book to a wider audience. I feel that I've been very fortunate with the book so far. It did win a National Book Critics' Circle award last month, which was wonderful. I just hope more people become aware of it and that that opens up so more opportunities for the book.

Has your publisher said anything like 'this is going to triple sales'?
I think publishers are kind of like doctors: They don't ever want to give you an exact prognosis. But they have put stickers on all the books. (Laughs) … I think that they had several thousand in reserve when this happened. I'm sure as needed, they'll [print more] and then the paperback will be out next fall.

Particularly journalists and those who write for magazines have said that they learn that they have a book when they're researching a a topic for an article and then they realize they're passionate about it and there's a lot more to what they're writing. Is that what happens?
I've written several things about Wilder before I did the book. Years and years ago, I did a long piece for the New York Review of Books about this biography of her daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, the journalist, that had basically claimed that Rose was the true author of the Little House books. And so, in examining that claim for that review, I looked at some of Wilder's original manuscripts on microfilm. That sort of started the process, in a way, because that was so fascinating. I didn't imagine doing anything else at that point, but I was aware that it was a really rich topic. And then, I later was the editor of Library of America's edition of the Little House books. … That was what really made me think of writing a new biography of her, because in writing the little footnotes for those volumes, I became aware of some of the history behind her books and her life, which opened up the sort fascinating opportunity to compare the myth with the reality.

What have you discovered about the strength of the frontier myth?
It's quite clear from the way that Wilder wanted to view her path as opposed to how it actually unfolded, that it was a very strong desire among white American settlers, particularly, to view their experience as this sort of great unfolding of the American Dream. And this is all part of Manifest Destiny, that white settlers had been given this divine duty to spread across the country and "civilize" it.
… [She said many times that she] wrote her books to memorialize her parents and she was always trying to cast them in the best possible light. So, it's not surprising that the books portray her father as a successful homesteader and farmer, whereas in reality he struggled and mostly failed all of his life. He had to work at other jobs to eke out some kind of a living. … Most farmers like Charles Ingalls were significantly undercapitalized and they were trying to farm on land that just was not suitable for what they call dry-land farming. It was actually pointed out to the government by one of their own scientists, John Wesley Powell, that this was going to be a disaster. He was well aware of not just the fact that there was less precipitation out on the Great Plains, but that it came in forms that were completely destructive to the kind of farming they wanted to do. … And they completely ignored him.

Did the era of Manifest Destiny parallel any other period in American history?
The thing that really leapt out at me from the history was that a lot of these settlers who came along just prior to the closing of frontier, they were up against the fact that the country was really running out of high-quality farming land. They were getting pushed into an area that was really unsuitable. I think that most of them did not know that. The Wilders, as a young married couple, washed out and failed on their homestead. They had proved up on the land, but could not make a go of it and got into so much debt that they had to leave the region. You see [in that] an event that's very much like the Dust Bowl; [it happened] in the 1890s in the northern part of the Great Plains and then that, of course, is going to be repeated in 1930s in the Dust Bowl in the southern Great Plains. And that was during the period in which Wilder wrote these books. … I think one of the sort of unique things about Wilder's life story, and I hope that people find this interesting about the book, is that she did have an incredibly close relationship with her daughter and they worked together to produce these books. I believe Wilder was the author of them, but basically what you have is this unique mother-daughter, writer-editor team. That is really unusual in the history of literature; I can't think of anything else that was quite like it. … [Prairie Fires] is kind of a joint biography of the two of them. And I think at the core of the biography is that relationship between mother and daughter.

Congratulations. We hope you can really enjoy these next couple of months until you figure out what's next. Do you know what's next?
I don't. I have some various ideas that I'm looking into, but I'm sort of looking forward to taking a little time off and I'm actually really looking forward to reading some of the other people who won Pulitzers this year. The novel that won for fiction—Less—is supposed to be really, really funny.