A Look Into The Later Years Of “Little House On The Prairie” Author Laura Ingalls Wilder

Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons

Curious about what happened to Laura Ingalls Wilder, author of the Little House on the Prairie series? Here, we’ve got everything you need to know about the later years of her life.

Wilder attended regular school, but due to her family’s tendency to move, taught herself much of her reading and writing.

On August 25, 1885, Laura married Almanzo Wilder. She had been teaching, but after getting married, she quit to help on the farm.

In the late 20s, Wilder wrote a book chronicling her life on the prairie, relaying stories of what it was really like to be one of the first pioneers.

At first, Wilder’s books were not well-received. Potential publishers said that they didn’t contain much character development (although the stories were interesting). Wilder decided to switch from writing in an autobiographical style to writing in a way that starred her and her family as the main characters.

Once she made the change, publishers and readers alike couldn’t get enough of her stories.

Wilder went on to write over the course of her life, publishing the final installment of the Little House series when she was 76 years old.

Almanzo died in 1949 at the age of 92. Laura passed in 1957 when she was 90 years old. The Little House on the Prairie  television series premiered 12 years after Laura and Almanzo’s daughter, Rose, published her mother’s diary, On the Way Home: The Diary of a Trip from South Dakota to Mansfield, Missouri, in 1894.