Author Laura Ingalls Wilder used her experiences growing up near De Smet as the basis for four of her novels. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
One of the pleasures of book hunting at yard sales, thrift stores and library sales is finding that unknown book or author. Or even, as in this case, an unknown book by a well-known author.
I came across “Writings to Young Women From Laura Ingalls Wilder, Volume One: On Wisdom and Virtues,” at a Salvation Army Thrift Store a few weeks back. Everyone who’s been near a television in the past several decades has heard of the series, “Little House on the Prairie,” based on her books of the same name.She and her family were true pioneers and her accounts of her years on the American frontier are not just great stories for young people but are also considered valuable historical records of that time. So I admit to be being more than a little surprised by this title from her.
It turns out that Laura Ingalls Wilder was also a newspaper columnist for The Missouri Ruralist, a small publication reportedly still in business. She didn’t start her career in journalism until she was in her forties, according to the book’s introduction. She wrote for the Ruralist for about fifteen years before beginning her Little House stories. So take heart, late bloomers: Laura began her career as a book author in her sixties!
Edited by Stephen W. Hines, this book is a compilation of some of her columns from the Ruralist about the use of wisdom in this life. Her writing here is clear, direct and somehow touching. As editor Hines puts it in his introduction, ” . . . nothing of real importance ever changes. Her concerns are not so different from the ones we have today, though they take different form.” Here are a few samples,
The habit of saying disagreeable things or of being careless about how what we say affects others grows on us so easily and so surely if we indulge it.
__________
I am sure we will all agree that these laws of ours should be as wise and as few as possible.
__________
Our hearts are mostly in the right place, but we seem weak in the head.
The book is a delight to read, filled with stories and anecdotes and lessons learned from years of living. It is, indeed, a book of wisdom of which there are way too few in these days. Our children and grandchildren should be exposed to these types of books at every opportunity. We should read them and talk about them together.
One last observation. Laura Ingalls Wilder died in 1957. Born in 1867, she lived nearly a century. It gives me a chill and a deep sense of our connected history to think that I was three years old when she passed.
Thank you and God bless you, Laura.
The Old Book Junkie 