Little House in the Big Woods

Little House in the Big Woods is an autobiographical children's novel by the American writer Laura Ingalls Wilder, published by Harper in 1932. It was the first of her books to appear and the beginning of the Little House series.

The book is based on the author's memories of her early childhood in the woods near Pepin, Wisconsin, in the early 1870s, and it describes what she observed and was taught in her fifth year. Laura helps her mother with the household, gathers wood chips, and takes part in the work of butchering and preserving meat for the winter, because the family's survival depends on the stores they put up in the autumn. The cousins come for Christmas, and Laura is given a rag doll she names Charlotte. When the first snow comes the family is largely cut off, and the book describes how the days are filled indoors: stories, chores, the sound of the wolves outside and the occasional visit to the nearest settlement.

Wilder wrote the series with her daughter Rose, and it has been read continuously since as an account of pioneer family life, with the harder material of the later books, the illness, the crop failures and the conflicts over land, held back from this first volume.