Lantern in Her Hand

The Place: Nebraska.
The time: the 1870's, when every day on the prairie brought its threat -of hostile Indians, of prairie fires, of blizzards, and the overwhelming threat of accident or illness to the little homesteading family, Will and Abbie Deal and their babies.
Hope, faith, and hard work finally make real for the Deals and their neighbors the dreams of productive farms and prosperous towns, of schools and hospitals, of well-paved roads to bring them close to the rest of the century.
And old Abbie Deal can look back with pride and wonder to her own part in the miracle.

When A Lantern in Her Hand came out in 1928, critics took little notice, but people everywhere soon discovered it. By the end of 1919, even as the Great Depression set in, Bess Streeter Aldrich's novel was in its twenty-first printing. Now translated into over twenty languages, A Lantern in Her Hand has outlasted literary fashions to touch generations of readers. It is the classic story of a pioneer woman. Bess Streeter Aldrich knew what she was writing about. Her protagonist, a strong-minded pioneer woman named Abbie Deal, was modeled on her own mother, who in 1854 had traveled by covered wagon to the Midwest. In A Lantern in Her Hand, Abbie accompanies her family to the soon-to-be state of Nebraska. There, in 1865, she marries and settles into a sod house of her own. The novel describes Abbie's years of child-raising, of making a frontier home able to withstand every adversity. A disciplined writer knowledgeable about true stories of pioneer days in Nebraska, Bess Streeter Aldrich conveys the strength of everyday things, the surprise of familiar faces, and the look of the unspoiled landscape during different seasons. Refusing to be broken by hard experience, Abbie sets a joyful example for her family - and for her readers. This Bison Book edition includes Bess Streeter Aldrich's own story of how she came to write A Lantern in Her Hand.