What can we learn about Pioneer America from the life of Laura Ingalls Wilder?

Caroline Fraser will be here to talk about her new biography, Prairie Fires.

Just how different was slavery in the city of Detroit from the well-known form of slavery

in the American South?

Time Isles will join us to talk about her new book, The Dawn of Detroit.

Alexander Alter will give us an update from the literary world.

Plus we'll talk about what we hear at the Book Review are reading.

This is Inside the New York Times Book Review.

I'm Pamela Paul.

Caroline Fraser joins us now from Santa Fe, New Mexico.

She is the author of Prairie Fires, The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder, reviewed this

week on our cover.

Caroline, thank you for being here.

Thanks for having me.

So this is a very ambitious book because it's not only a biography of Laura Ingalls Wilder.

It's also about the books that she wrote and also really about the time and place in America

when she lived and that legacy.

Was this a project long in the making?

Yes, I mean, I've been writing about Wilder for a while, but the thing that really sparked

this biography was when I edited the Library of America's edition of the Little House

Books, which gave me the opportunity to revisit the books and write notes on the text and

write a chronology of Wilder's life.

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