On the Banks of Plum Creek

On the Banks of Plum Creek is an autobiographical children's novel by Laura Ingalls Wilder, published in 1937 as the fourth of the nine Little House books. It covers about five years of her childhood in the 1870s, when the family lived at Plum Creek near Walnut Grove in Minnesota, and it follows Little House on the Prairie in the series.

The book opens with the family travelling by covered wagon from Kansas into Minnesota and moving into a dugout in the creek bank, a home cut into the earth until a wooden house can be built. Laura's father takes on a wheat crop against credit at the store, and the children start school in town, where the girls meet neighbours and Laura runs into the social rules of a place that is not the prairie.

Wilder wrote the book as a true account of an American pioneer childhood, and the shape of the year supplies the drama: a grasshopper swarm strips the fields, a blizzard closes the country, and the family has to decide whether to stay through another season. Its plain, child's-eye narration is the same instrument as the earlier volumes in the series.