Laura Ingalls Wilder (1867-1957) was an American writer best known for an autobiographical, though lightly fictionalized, series of children’s books, the Little House books, first published in 1932. The Little House books were based on the experiences of Laura and her family as pioneers in the American Midwest. From 1891 to 1892, however, Wilder lived in the US South with her husband, Almanzo, and young daughter, Rose, in Florida, just over the Alabama state line. In Little House in Dixie: Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Life in the South, author Julie Hedgepeth Williams chronicles events that occurred following The First Four Years, Laura’s manuscript which was published posthumously as the last book in the Little House series.

Hoping to find a warm climate and free homestead land that they could farm, the Wilders followed Laura’s cousins and Almanzo’s brother to Florida. Almost immediately things turned sour. Having arrived shortly after Laura’s cousin was married, the Wilders, especially Laura, were resented by her cousin’s young wife. Rose turned five and likely enrolled in school–and if so, she was an oddity, the only young student in that area where most children didn’t go to school until age ten or twelve. And then there were the moonshiners. Illegally made alcohol flowed freely and made a lasting negative impression on Rose, who, as an adult, wrote an award-winning short story about backwoods Florida moonshiners. Eventually, the Wilders fled, as did Almanzo’s brother and one of Laura’s cousins, all having failed in their venture to the South.

Little House in Dixie continues and expands Laura Ingalls Wilder’s story while providing insight into nineteenth-century Southern history and culture. Williams pieces together forgotten segments of one of America’s most well-known and beloved writers and highlights the significance of the Wilders’ unhappy months in Florida. Surprisingly, without this time spent in the South, it is almost certain the Little House series would never have been published, as the Wilders were contemplating starting over again in New Zealand before they moved to Florida instead.