Little Town on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder

Her newfound social life distracts her from school, resulting in a need to take additional studies during the summer. After a birthday party for classmate Ben Woodworth, Laura grows closer to her classmates. De Smet throws a number of exciting literary events, including minstrel shows, a spelling bee, and singing contests. Laura, who anticipates applying for a teaching certificate, dedicates much of her time to studying. During the winter session, a new teacher, Mr. Still, she decides to discontinue teaching at the end of the semester. Wilder struggles to maintain order in the school, succeeding only once the school board intervenes.

Nellie begins to ostracize Laura, manipulating her classmates into doing the same. Laura finds that their teacher, Eliza Jane Wilder, is Almanzo’s sibling. When Laura goes to school, she finds that her least favorite girl, Nellie Oleson, has moved in from Plum Creek and has also enrolled. She also befriends Ida Brown, the daughter of Reverend Brown, the town’s main religious official.

Here, Laura reunites with Minnie Johnson and Mary Power, her friends from before her family’s last move. When autumn comes, the Ingalls move into the town center to find a safer shelter and live closer to survival resources and social support. Laura, Grace, and Carrie live at home while the Ingalls parents take Mary to school. However, before the school year starts, Pa sells a cow, allowing Mary to enroll. Mary and Laura accept that Mary will have to wait longer to go to college. Their hopes are foiled when a flock of blackbirds ravages the crops. Back on the family farm, the corn and oat crops are flourishing, and Pa projects that the extra funds will send Mary to college. They witness a number of horse races and observe Almanzo, who later marries Laura, win a buggy race. That summer, on Independence Day, Laura walks with Pa and Carrie to the town center to celebrate with their neighbors. However, she presses on in order to earn money to send her sister, Mary, to an Iowa school that educates blind people. Laura takes up work at the company, instantly disliking it for its monotony and tediousness. He asks because the town has recently become a hub for tailoring services, creating a number of jobs relegated to women.

One day, fifteen-year-old Laura is eating dinner with her father, “Pa,” who asks her whether she intends to go to town to find work as a seamstress for a shirt company. The novel begins in the spring after a record-breaking winter in the American Midwest. Famous for lending a unique female voice to American literature, the novel received a Newbery Honor in 1942. Rural American author Laura Ingalls Wilder’s autobiographical children’s novel, Little Town on the Prairie (1941) is the seventh installation in Little House series, in which Wilder recounts her life growing up in De Smet, South Dakota, and the unique challenges of coming of age as a girl in rural America.

Little Town on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder