‘Too Good to Be Altogether Lost' Review: Back to the Little House

Wall Street Journal

24-07-2025

One of the strangest aspects of the cultural madness that exploded around the Covid-19 years was the frantic literary passion to disavow books and writers not in total keeping with the political fashion of the moment. Driven by a new mania for ideological purity, iconoclasts in the children's-book business sought to extirpate any hint of the offensive. 'Sensitivity readers' combed through manuscripts for wrongthink. Older works were eliminated, bowdlerized or memory-holed, including those by Dr. Seuss, Roald Dahl and Laura Ingalls Wilder.
The hysteria seems to have passed. It is now possible to urge a reconsideration of rash judgments without fear of getting blackballed. In 'Too Good to Be Altogether Lost,' Pamela Smith Hill makes a cogent and delightful case for, as she puts it, 'rediscovering Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House Books.'
Ms. Hill has a great mastery over her material: She wrote a 2007 account of Wilder's life and annotated Wilder's ill-starred, sad-historied autobiography, 'Pioneer Girl,' when it finally made it to print in 2014. There is, in fact, a great deal of sadness in the story of how Laura Ingalls Wilder (1867-1957) turned her childhood memories into fiction, and in this perceptive and wide-ranging account Ms. Hill not only discusses the woman's life, artistry and place in American literature. She also solves a literary mystery that has long bedeviled Wilder's legacy—and millions of her readers.
'Too Good to Be Altogether Lost' gets its title from a remark Wilder made about the stories of her youth during a speech at the Detroit Book Fair in 1937. That year, Harper & Brothers published 'On the Banks of Plum Creek'; it was Wilder's fourth work in a historical-fiction series for children for which she drew on her pioneer experiences in the West with its sod houses, prairie fires, hard winters and displaced American Indian tribes. Ms. Hill rightly applies the 'too good' phrase to the entire 'Little House' series. With one exception, the novels are vivid, textured, unforgettable tales of 19th-century hardship, grit and family life. In mounting a defense of Wilder's work, Ms. Hill necessarily tackles certain 'problematic' elements, not least the prejudicial attitudes toward Native Americans expressed by some of her characters in particular in the series' third book, 'Little House on the Prairie.'