Laura Ingalls Wilder books in order

Laura Ingalls Wilder (1867-1957) was an American writer whose Little House books, published between 1932 and 1943, retell her childhood in a pioneer family on the American frontier. She was born in Pepin County, Wisconsin, on 7 February 1867 and died at Mansfield, Missouri, on 10 February 1957.

Her family moved across the Midwest and into Dakota Territory, and she taught in one-room schools before marrying Almanzo Wilder in 1885. In 1894 the couple settled at Rocky Ridge Farm near Mansfield, where she wrote a farm column and later the books; the farm is now a museum. Her daughter, the writer Rose Wilder Lane, encouraged and edited the series, though how much she shaped it is debated. Harper & Brothers published Little House in the Big Woods (1932), Farmer Boy (1933), Little House on the Prairie (1935), On the Banks of Plum Creek (1937), By the Shores of Silver Lake (1939), The Long Winter (1940), Little Town on the Prairie (1941) and These Happy Golden Years (1943). The First Four Years followed posthumously in 1971. She was a Newbery Medal runner-up five times between 1938 and 1944. The American Library Association created the Laura Ingalls Wilder Medal in 1954 with Wilder as first recipient; it was renamed the Children's Literature Legacy Award in 2018 because of how her books portray Native Americans and African Americans.

For collectors

The original Harper editions were illustrated by Helen Sewell (the first three books) and by Sewell with Mildred Boyle (the rest). A newly illustrated uniform edition with pictures by Garth Williams followed in 1953, so copies with Sewell's art predate it. The 1932 first edition of Little House in the Big Woods (176 pages) sold for two dollars in a jacket carrying Sewell's illustration.