Little Town on the Prairie

Little Town on the Prairie is an autobiographical children's novel by Laura Ingalls Wilder, published in 1941 as the seventh of the nine Little House books. It is set in De Smet in South Dakota and opens in the spring that follows the long winter of the previous volume, so the town's recovery is the ground the story stands on.

Laura is fifteen. She takes her first paid job away from home, sits her last term of school, and becomes caught up in the town's social life, including the literary society and the uncomfortable business of being noticed by a young man. Her ambition is practical: a teacher's certificate means an income that can help keep her sister Mary at the school for the blind in Iowa.

Wilder wrote the series as a true account of a pioneer childhood, and the book's interest is in the ordinary economy of a small prairie town, the work that pays for things and the arrangements families make for each other. The novel ends with Laura holding a certificate and a post twelve miles away at the Brewster settlement, which is where the next volume begins.