Laura Ingalls Wilder's book The little House on the Prairie, along with its many sequels, constituted the embodiment of what we today call family values, the traditional values that are seen as having a particular role in the development of frontier America and in the shaping of the nation as it moved West. The vitality of the book and its ideas is apparent in the success of the television series which presented the same values to new audiences some 40 years after the first publication of the book.
Wilder herself had a particular vision in mind when she wrote this book, and she was clear about what she wanted to achieve:
I wanted the children now to understand more about the beginning of things, to know what is behind the things they see--what it is that made America as they know it (Spaeth, 1987, 1).
The family structure depicted in the book and the personality of the main character in particular serves to anchor the story in the American experience and to show young readers the way Wilder believes early settlers lived and the values that infused their lives.
Wilder is identified with the American vision of the importance and superiority of small-town life. She set five of her autobiographical novels around De Smet, South Dakota, a town she knew well and understood enough to convey her attitudes in her books:
Every house, every store, every place was associated with its own set of people and activities. People acted and interacted within a context heavily shaped by the buildings, places, and open spaces that made up the town's physical environment (Miller, 1994, 17).
Similarly, Wilder used the development of the community in the Little House books to reflect her understanding of her own community and of the very idea of a community. In this context, the primary theme of the book could be related to today's concern with family values, and the family in Little House on the Prairie reflects many of the same conc...