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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]There have been a couple recent and we'll publicized biographies of Laura Ingalls Wilder depicting her as an awful person as well as a politically active racist, and showing that almost nothing in the Little House series was true. I suspect that had some influence on the decision, even if they aren't saying it. "Author depicts lived experience in a way we now dislike" is different from "Manipulative, racist crank wrote fiction that is racist." The current view is the latter. [/quote]

I follow the publicity on this pretty closely, and I'm not sure I've seen anything that says that -- can you provide cites?

Here's what I've read --  Her daughter Rose was a conservative Libertarian, and also kind of a mess, and struggled with some mental illness.  Rose is the one that made a lot of the edits in the book that took it further away from the truth.  Laura opposed FDR and the New Deal, but that was pretty common for Republicans of that era -- we forget now, but FDR was super-controversial before the War (when people rallied together and got over most of the FDR-hate in order to support the troops/country).  My great-grandfather thought that FDR was going to run American business into the group with socialism -- and he was an immigrant from a poor family.

Laura had, all told, a pretty crappy life -- the stuff in the books is bad enough (locust infestation, losing home after home, father being gone for long periods in search of work, almost dying multiple times), but her life after the book was marked by a lot of awful things -- her husband was paralyzed, at least one child died in infancy, she was constantly broke, etc.  (I sort of wonder actually if their family had some sort of genetic disorder that particularly affected male children, as her mother miscarried or had early infant deaths of at least one male child, as did Laura and Rose.)  I am sure that I would greatly disagree with the politics of both Wilder women, but I'm not sure how that affects how I feel about the books.  Tolstoy was a great novelist, but one heck of a wackadoodle when it came to political and social issues.

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