The First Four Years

The First Four Years is an autobiographical novel by Laura Ingalls Wilder, published in 1971 and generally treated as the last of the nine Little House books.

The book begins with Laura's marriage to Almanzo Wilder and follows the couple as they establish a homestead of their own. The material comes directly from their early years together, and much of it is the unglamorous arithmetic of farming: good crops and bad ones, weather that ruins an entire season, debts carried into the following year, neighbours who help and neighbours who do not, and the animals on which everything depends. Their daughter Rose is born, and the family's prospects rise and fall with the harvest. The manuscript is written more plainly than the earlier books and was published unrevised after Wilder's death.

The book is short and often bleak, and it is generally read as the rawest account in the series of what the pioneering life actually cost the people living it. Storms, illness and a fire all take their share of the couple's early prosperity, and the account keeps to what was recorded rather than tidying it up.