Peninsula College’s Writer-in-Residence for 2025 is set to address Port Townsend audiences about how “Little House on the Prairie” has retained a surprising relevance in today’s political climate.

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Caroline Fraser will be visiting the Port Angeles and Port Townsend campuses of Peninsula College from May 13-15, delivering an author talk from 3-5 p.m. at the Port Townsend campus on Fort Worden, with a question-and-answer period facilitated by professor Kelly Doran.

Fraser’s most recent book, “Murderland: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers,” is set for release on June 10, just days after her residency on the Olympic Peninsula.

But her author talk in Port Townsend May 14 will mostly center around the subjects addressed by her book “Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder,” which won the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Biography. It  “reexamined the mythos of the pioneer era and its depiction in pop culture.”

Fraser, who still harbors fond memories of attending writing conferences at Centrum as a high school student in the late 1970s, began by considering how certain biographies “have shaped our collective identity as Americans.”

Fraser then applied that to Wilder in particular, whom she concluded has yielded a significant impact on “the last few decades” of our country’s views of its own history and culture.

“Thanks to the television series, these views were available even beyond the books,” Fraser said. “Wilder promoted views of farming and homesteading, through the ‘Little House on the Prairie’ books, that accurately captured some aspects of their reality. But in other ways, they left false impressions of such farming and homesteading’s levels of success.”

According to Fraser, “This fed into our desire for the rosiest pictures” of the settling of the American West, whose actual conditions and outcomes she asserts ran counter to many of the “environmental and historical narratives” that have shaped our nation since.

Fraser identifies a direct evolutionary line connecting such views to the development of modern political philosophies, especially since Wilder was encouraged and assisted in her writing by her daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, who became one of the more influential advocates of the American libertarian movement, alongside Objectivist writer Ayn Rand.

“Right now, we’re going through a period when a lot of people are rejecting the ideas of centralized government, and government aid,” said Fraser, who drew parallels to when the “Little House on the Prairie” books were first published, during the presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. “There was a lot of resentment toward the New Deal, especially among farmers.”

Fraser further compared the Depression era to today, in terms of how many people “felt forced to do things they didn’t want to do by government programs,” to the degree that “a lot of their rhetoric from back then is being repeated in what we hear now.”

Fraser’s author talk in Port Townsend on May 14 will be followed by a book-signing made possible through Port Angeles’ Port Book and News.

May 15 will mark Fraser’s return to the Port Angeles campus of Peninsula College, where the Little Theater will screen PBS’s “Laura Ingalls Wilder: Prairie to Page” from 1:30-4 p.m., featuring a post-film conversation with the author, and faculty facilitators including professors Helen Lovejoy and Rich Riski.

All these events are free and open to the public, and Peninsula College invites students, educators, readers and aspiring writers alike to take part and satisfy their curiosities.