A broken engagement sends Lily Bloom to Wylder, where she hopes to rebuild her life and reclaim her dignity. Theodore Harvey longs for a wife and family to chase away the loneliness of frontier living. His gardens and sturdy home are stunning but there should be footsteps other than his to bring the place alive. Can a southern belle find happiness amidst the grit of the wild west?

Lushly illustrated with beloved images and quotations from the Little House series, The World of Laura Ingalls Wilder, by New York Times bestselling author Marta McDowell, examines and celebrates Wilder’s unique relationship with the American frontier.

Thanks in part to the Ken Burns documentary The Dust Bowl, Sanora Babb is perhaps best known today for her novel Whose Names Are Unknown (2004), which might have been published in 1939 had her publisher not thought the market too small for two Dust Bowl novels, hers and Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. Into the twenty-first century, Babb wrote and published lyrical prose and poetry that revealed her prescient ideas about gender, race, and the environment. The essays collected in Unknown No More recover and analyze her previously unrecognized contributions to American letters. Editors Joanne Dearcopp and Christine Hill Smith have assembled a group of distinguished scholars who, for the first time in book-length form, explore the life and work of Sanora Babb. This collection of pathbreaking essays addresses Babb’s position within the literature of the Great Plains and American West, her leftist political odyssey as a card-carrying Communist who ultimately broke with the Party, and her ecofeminist leanings as reflected in the environmental themes she explored in her fiction and nonfiction. With literary sensibilities reminiscent of Willa Cather, Ralph Ellison, and Meridel LeSueur, Babb’s work revealed gender-based, environmental, and working-class injustices from the Depression era to the late twentieth century. No longer unknown, Sanora Babb’s life and work form a prism through which the peril and promise of twentieth-century America may be seen.

American children need books that draw on their own history and circumstances, not just the classic European fairy tales. They need books that enlist them in the great democratic experiment that is the United States. These were the beliefs of many of the authors, illustrators, editors, librarians, and teachers who expanded and transformed children’s book publishing between the 1930s and the 1960s. Although some later critics have argued that the books published in this era offered a vision of a safe, secure, simple world without injustice or unhappy endings, Gary D. Schmidt shows that the progressive political agenda shared by many Americans who wrote, illustrated, published, and taught children’s books had a powerful effect. Authors like James Daugherty, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Lois Lenski, Ingri and Edgar Parin D’Aulaire, Virginia Lee Burton, Robert McCloskey, and many others addressed directly and indirectly the major social issues of a turbulent time: racism, immigration and assimilation, sexism, poverty, the Great Depression, World War II, the atomic bomb, and the threat of a global cold war. The central concern that many children’s book authors and illustrators wrestled with was the meaning of America and democracy itself, especially the tension between individual freedoms and community ties. That process produced a flood of books focused on the American experience and intent on defining it in terms of progress toward inclusivity and social justice. Again and again, children’s books addressed racial discrimination and segregation, gender roles, class differences, the fate of Native Americans, immigration and assimilation, war, and the role of the United States in the world. Fiction and nonfiction for children urged them to see these issues as theirs to understand, and in some ways, theirs to resolve. Making Americans is a study of a time when the authors and illustrators of children’s books consciously set their eyes on national and international sights, with the hope of bringing the next generation into a sense of full citizenship.

Sun Lin, a Chinese princess, has been hiding in full view in Wylder. But when her ancestral obligations tug her homeward, she sacrifices her heart. Lui Wei deals in gemstones far from his medical practice in China. Life in Wylder is good, especially with the beautiful Lin on his arm. When she flees town, he is forced to follow her, if only to learn whether she loves him or if he's been a fool to believe his heart. Can a couple plant roots in the western frontier when they were born in the shadow of the Great Wall? Only time will tell...

Three women on the run. After the death of her husband, Clara flees a hanging judge and seeks refuge with her brother in Wylder, Wyoming. With secrets of her own and good reasons to flee, spoiled and vain Mary Rose joins Clara on the trek to Wyoming. Surely a suitable man exists somewhere. Emma is a mystery. A crack shot and expert horsewoman, her harrowing past seeps out in a steady drip. She's on the run from something, but what? After the three women descend on Wylder, a budding romance leads to exposure of their pasts. As disaster looms, will any of them escape?

Meg Channing is on the run from her home in Boston. She's on her way to a new life—until a horrific train crash strands her in Wylder just days before Christmas. Tate Taylor's waiting on a shipment of explosives for his mining business. When the Union Pacific train carrying them derails, he hightails it to the site, hoping the whole town isn't blown to smithereens. Just as they find happiness, secrets from both their pasts threaten to tear them apart. Wylder is safe—but are their hearts?

This is a suspenseful novel in which Mark Wylder disappears just as he is about to marry Dorcas Brandon. He leaves no trace but finally, letters from him arrive with a European postmark. Meanwhile, a sinister figure appears and claims he is the rightful groom for Dorcas.

It was late in the autumn, and I was skimming along, through a rich English county, in a postchaise, among tall hedgerows gilded, like all the landscape, with the slanting beams of sunset. The road makes a long and easy descent into the little town of Gylingden, and down this we were going at an exhilarating pace, and the jingle of the vehicle sounded like sledge-bells in my ears, and its swaying and jerking were pleasant and life-like. I fancy I was in one of those moods which, under similar circumstances, I sometimes experience still—a semi-narcotic excitement, silent but delightful. An undulating landscape, with a homely farmstead here and there, and plenty of old English timber scattered grandly over it, extended mistily to my right; on the left the road is overtopped by masses of noble forest. The old park of Brandon lies there, more than four miles from end to end. These masses of solemn and discoloured verdure, the faint but splendid lights, and long filmy shadows, the slopes and hollows—my eyes wandered over them all with that strange sense of unreality, and that mingling of sweet and bitter fancy, with which we revisit a scene familiar in very remote and early childhood, and which has haunted a long interval of maturity and absence, like a romantic reverie.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1838.