While heavily drawing on her itinerant upbringing, her children’s books are ultimately fiction. As Wilder herself said, “All I have told is true but it is not the whole truth.” For example, Wilder made her family seem far more isolated than they actually were. During the famed Long Winter, which devastated South Dakota in 1880-1881 and left the Ingalls stuck in their De Smet house, the family had house guests who don’t appear in the books. Further, Wilder’s books never mention her younger brother, Charles Frederick, who died as an infant. Wilder’s memoir Pioneer Girl, hidden until it was published in 2014, gives a darker look at those years of hardship, battling poverty, locusts, and her father’s often unsound decisions.