My grandma always said that God made libraries so that people didn’t have any excuse to be stupid.
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| — | Joan Bauer, Rules of the Road (via wordpainting) |
“When I walk into the kitchen today, I am not alone. Whether we know it or not, none of us is. We bring mothers and fathers and kitchen tables, and every meal we have ever eaten. Food is never just food. It’s also a way of getting at something else; who we are, who we have been, and who we want to be.”
It’s the birthday of another writer from the prairie, Laura Ingalls Wilder, (books by this author) born just north of Pepin, Wisconsin (1867), author of the wildly popular children’s book Little House on the Prairie (1935) and several other books about growing up in the Midwest in the late 1800s. They’re all part of the Little House series, which she began writing when she was in her 60s. Since her death, about a hundred different titles have appeared in the Little House series that she created. From her books have come also a television series on NBC (1974–84), a 26-episode animated Japanese cartoon series called “Laura, The Prairie Girl,” a couple of made-for-TV movies, an ABC mini-series (2005), and a musical that opened at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis in summer 2008 and is currently on a North American tour. This month the show is in Toronto.
All of her books have remained in print continuously since the time they were first published, have been translated widely, and have sold millions of copies. Little House in the Big Woods begins, “Once upon a time, sixty years ago, a little girl lived in the Big Woods of Wisconsin, in a little gray house made of logs.”
