Little House on the Prairie for Adults

Jeannette Walls (author of The Glass Castle) published a "true life novel" in 2009, Half-Broke Horses, based on the oral histories of her grandmother who grew up in a muddy dug-out on the Texas prairie at the turn of the 20th century. Favorably reviewed on the front page of the New York Times Book Review, the novel has been widely described as Wilder's Little House with a lot more grit and hardship.

It also helps answer a riddle, according to Liesl Schillinger of the Times: "Anyone who devoured Walls’s incandescent 2005 memoir, The Glass Castle, has wondered: How did such untamed characters come to exist in America, in the not-so-distant 1960s and ’70s? Walls’s new book, Half Broke Horses, a novelistic re-creation of the life of her maternal grand­mother, Lily Casey Smith, in the first half of the 20th century, told in her grandmother’s voice, gives a partial answer to that perplexing question." More.