What Happened to the Real Laura Ingalls Wilder from ‘Little House on the Prairie’

Laura Ingalls Wilder delighted fans as both the author of the book series Little House on the Prairie and as a fictional character in the 1974 TV series, played by Melissa Gilbert. But neither the on-the-page Wilder nor the televised Wilder was exactly like the real one, who was born in 1867. 

The Little House on the Prairie book series had nine books: 1932’s Little House in the Big Woods, 1933’s Farmer Boy (about the life of her husband Almanzo Wilder), 1935’s Little House on the Prairie, 1937’s On the Banks of Plum Creek, 1939’s By the Shores of Silver Lake, 1940’s The Long Winter, 1941’s Little Town on the Prairie, 1943’s These Happy Golden Years and 1971’s The First Four Years (which was discovered after Laura’s death and was published unedited). 

The books were inspired by Laura’s real life, but she took great creative liberties, both big and small. For example, in the first book, Little House in the Big Woods, Laura is 5. In real life, she was 3 when her family lived in the woods. Caroline Fraser, who wrote Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder, told Iowa Source in 2017 that the books are “very accurate, up to a point.”

“[Laura] left a lot of things out, sometimes because she felt they weren’t appropriate for children,” she said. Most significantly, she “ruthlessly cut entire chapters of their life that did not reflect well on her parents.” While the TV version of Charles Ingalls, played by Michael Landon, was a TV-perfect dad, in real life, Fraser said there “were a lot of struggles, debts, even a kind of aimless quality — and she left all of that out.”

“Much of it is accurate. But the real story is way more complicated,” she said of Laura’s life. “. . . Her real life is even more remarkable, in some ways, than the story in her books, which ended at age 18 with her marriage.”

Laura only started writing in her 40s, penning columns for local publications in Mansfield, Miss., where she and Almanzo lived. Laura wrote her first book, Pioneer Girl, in her 60s. 

She was encouraged by her daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, who was a successful newspaper writer. “Rose was one of the most successful freelance writers in the ’20s. The Saturday Evening Post serialized one of her stories for $30,000 in 1920s money, which is half a million dollars today,” Glynnis MacNicol, who created the 2023 iHeartRadio podcast Wilder, all about Laura’s life and legacy, said in a 2023 interview. 

Pioneer Girl was considered too harsh about the realities of frontier life. Rose had the idea to make it into stories for children and worked with her mother to shape Little House in the Big Woods into a more family-friendly version of the story. Pioneer Girl was ultimately published in 2014 with annotations. 

Rose continued to help her mother with the Little House books, and to this day there’s debate about how much of the books were written by Laura and how much by Rose. At the same time, Rose also published two books, 1932’s Let the Hurricane Roar and 1938’s Free Land, which retold Laura’s stories about her and Almanzo’s families for adults. 

However, even though Laura and Rose wrote the Little House series as fictional novels, later in her life Rose would defend the books as true. William Anderson, a writer who first wrote about Laura at age 16, told Slate in 2016 that Rose was angry at him for saying the books weren’t entirely true. “She was so adamant, like a fanatic, that everything in those books was true and that nobody would suggest there was any fictionalizing done. To the point where she was going to sue me,” he remembered.

“The image was that of a nice old lady who lived on a farm who just decided that she’d write some books about her childhood,” he said. “I think most people believed that for quite a few years, and they accepted it, and made her into some kind of goddess, like Grandma Moses. Laura had to do some justifying of the whole question of authorship to make it comfortable to herself.”

Almanzo died in 1949 and Laura continued to live alone on their farm. Laura became sick at the end of 1956 and died in early 1957, three days before her 90th birthday.

Rose died in 1968, and her heir, Roger MacBride, took control of Little House. It was MacBride who optioned the TV rights. 

Little House on the Prairie, the TV series, was not accurate to either Laura’s real life or the books. “I have to think she would have been horrified at the liberties that were taken on that show,” Fraser said. “She fictionalized her life to some extent, but always tried to be true to her memories.”

In Laura’s book (as in real life), her family moved around almost constantly. Instead, the show’s characters and locations were drawn mostly from 1937’s On the Banks of Plum Creek, which narrates five years of the Ingalls family’s lives when they lived near Walnut Grove, Minn., which became the show’s core setting. Some of the characters from the TV show appear in the book, like Alison Arngrim’s Nellie Oleson (who was actually a composite of multiple girls Laura went to school with).

On the show, Laura and Almanzo (played by Dean Butler) marry at the beginning of season 7. In real life (and the books), the Ingalls family moved to De Smet, S.D., where Laura became a teacher and married Almanzo. Those events were chronicled in These Happy Golden Years, which was the original end of the Little House series before The First Four Years was found and published.

Never miss a story — sign up for PEOPLE’s free daily newsletter to stay up-to-date on the best of what PEOPLE has to offer​​, from celebrity news to compelling human interest stories.  

Laura and Almanzo’s Missouri home is now the site of the Laura Ingalls Wilder House and Museum. Walnut Grove is also home to the Laura Ingalls Wilder Museum, and De Smet also has a Laura Ingalls Wilder Memorial Society, which hosts an annual pageant.

A new Little House on the Prairie series is heading to Netflix, but how closely it will follow the books or Laura’s real-life story remains to be seen.