I spent an hour and a half escaping from reality by reading Ana Mardoll’s live-tweets of “Prairie Fires,” a biography of Laura Ingalls Wilder (yes, of the Little House books) and Rose Wilder Lane by Caroline Fraser. Mardoll gathered her tweets and posted them on her blog here:

anamardoll.com (there are several posts)

Anyway, Wilder and Lane, they were both pieces of work, horrible pieces of work who were big on pulling yourself up by your bootstraps and anti-tax and anti-government. But they didn’t tell the truth about their history and they misled people into believing you could be a small farmer on the prairie and make it, when in point of fact, you can’t. Mardoll’s tweets also explained who Roger McBride was (the guy who inherited Lane’s estate)—he was one of Lane’s “young men.” (And yeah, it’s as skeevy as you can imagine.) But it’s important because Lane is one of the founding mothers of American Libertarianism with Ayn Rand and Isabel Peterson, but, like so many Libertarians, they were such egotists they couldn’t work together.

“Prairie Fires” won the Pulitzer Prize for biography in 2018. I’m trying to decide if I want to read it, because Wilder and Lane come off as thoroughly awful people and I’m not sure I’ve got it in me for a hate read, not after today.

Here’s a link if you’re interested: amazon.com

And yeah, in its own special way, it does relate to what’s happening in the present day, because a lot of our MYTHS about stalwart white people settling the prairie came from Laura Ingalls Wilder and Rose Wilder Lane. And it’s pretty much lies, myths and fantasies.