From the November/December 2000 issue of The Horn Book Magazine

Future Classics

aron Copland’s music has been in and on the air in the early months of 2000 because of various centennial celebrations of his birth. It’s been a thought-provoking treat as the millennium is either beginning or ending, whichever way you count it. Close your eyes and listen for a minute: “Appalachian Spring.” “Rodeo.” “Fanfare for the Common Man.” “Quiet City.” “Old American Songs.” Singable and often simple sounding, but sophisticated and polished at the same time. So American, so full of themes and ideas, optimism and possibility. To adults the music is familiar; it’s evocative and unmistakable. To younger listeners it is merely unmistakable.

If Copland’s music is the mid-twentieth century sound of Americana and the American spirit, then the Little House books by Laura Ingalls Wilder, also written in the mid-twentieth century but about an earlier period, convey some of the same spirit for children, and do so with similar vitality and assurance.

The stories of the Ingalls family and their progress from Wisconsin to South Dakota, through good times and bad, unselfconsciously recall the expansionist era of American history. The books describe a self-sufficient, brave, and proud family. Most important in my mind, in book after book, they give precise, accurate details of changing life that shifted quickly from rural to agricultural on the way to industrial in the last third of the nineteenth century. If it is a time that is distant but still plausible to me, it is unimaginably remote to today’s children. All the more reason to make the books a gift to children a century hence.

There’s no magic in the Little House books, no invisible railway platform leading to a fantastic place, no wizards at all. It’s a plain account of ordinary lives, that’s just what makes it so thrilling and so engrossing. The Ingalls family’s ordinary lives are so far from our own. The lesson they teach, without comment, is that there is dignity, honor, and pleasure in work well done. They teach it superbly.

My mother kept a draft of the letter I wrote to Laura Ingalls Wilder when I was nine years old, almost half a century ago, along with her reply. Wilder’s note is brief, the signature spidery. I rattled on. I told her about my suburban family and wondered “if I tell the story of my life, whether it will be as interesting to a little girl in the next century as yours has been to mine.” I don’t know the answer to that question. I do know that I’ve been reading Wilder’s stories aloud to children all my adult life. I hope to read them to grandchildren one day in the new century, and I want them to be read well beyond 2101.

—Eden Ross Lipson

From the November/December 2000 issue of The Horn Book Magazine