Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    The First Four Years
    The First Four Years
    The First Four Years
    Audiobook2 hours

    The First Four Years

    Written by Laura Ingalls Wilder

    Narrated by Cherry Jones

    4/5

    ()

    Switch to ebook

    About this audiobook

    Laura Ingalls Wilder is beginning life with her new husband, Almanzo, in their own little house. Laura is a young pioneer wife now, and must work hard with Almanzo, farming the land around their home on the South Dakota prairie. Soon their baby daughter, Rose, is born, and the young family must face the hardships and triumphs encountered by so many American pioneers.

    And so Laura Ingalls Wilder's adventure as a little pioneer girl ends, and her new life as a pioneer wife and mother begins. The nine Little House books have been cherished by generations of readers as both a unique glimpse into America's frontier past and a heartwarming, unforgettable story.

    Correlates to the Common Core State Standards in English Language Arts.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateFeb 7, 2017
    ISBN9780062657046
    Author

    Laura Ingalls Wilder

    Laura Ingalls Wilder (1867–1957) was born in a log cabin in the Wisconsin woods. With her family, she pioneered throughout America’s heartland during the 1870s and 1880s, finally settling in Dakota Territory. She married Almanzo Wilder in 1885; their only daughter, Rose, was born the following year. The Wilders moved to Rocky Ridge Farm at Mansfield, Missouri, in 1894, where they established a permanent home. After years of farming, Laura wrote the first of her beloved Little House books in 1932. The nine Little House books are international classics. Her writings live on into the twenty-first century as America’s quintessential pioneer story.

    More audiobooks from Laura Ingalls Wilder

    Related to The First Four Years

    Titles in the series (5)

    View More
    View More

    Related audiobooks

    Children's Classics For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Little House On The Controversy: Laura Ingalls Wilder's Name Removed From Book Award

      Jun 25, 2018

      The Association for Library Service to Children voted unanimously to strike Wilder's name from a major children's lit award over concerns about how the author referred to Native Americans and blacks.

      2 min read

    • Article

      Home And Away

      Sep 14, 2022

      Home And Away
      2 min read

    • Article

      Away With Sackcloth And Ashes

      Jan 5, 2023

      TRADITIONALLY, this is the sackcloth and ashes time of year, the lull after Christmas’s storm, when minds turn to sobriety, abstinence and being a better person. At least that’s what they say in the papers. I would prefer to push on with the excess u

      2 min read

    • Article

      Our Door Was Always Open

      Jan 30, 2024

      I once thought my folks invented the opendoor policy. Our door was always open. Whether it was a neighbor searching for his cow who’d escaped through a low spot in the line fence, a student selling magazine subscriptions, or a Watkins salesman, all w

      3 min read

    • Article

      Drawn to THE MOORS

      Feb 8, 2022

      Drawn to THE MOORS
      11 min read

    • Article

      Rituals And Renewal

      Jan 4, 2024

      IAM BR ACED FOR THE sag of January. It’s a new thing for me. Usually, January is one of my favourite months. The real beginning of the year (February) seems far away and the weeks feel fat and lazy with the promise of no routines aside from the crick

      2 min read

    • Article

      Great Escape

      Sep 2, 2022

      Great Escape
      7 min read

    • Article

      Tathra Hotel

      May 16, 2018

      Tathra Hotel
      6 min read

    • Article

      Plum Crazy

      Jan 31, 2021

      Plum Crazy
      2 min read

    • Article

      The Old Settler's Farm

      May 30, 2023

      The Old Settler's Farm
      3 min read

    • Article

      The Herd word

      Jan 7, 2020

      The Herd word
      17 min read

    • Article

      A Tale Of Two Christmases

      Dec 17, 2020

      A Tale Of Two Christmases
      7 min read

    • Article

      To You, With Love

      Oct 17, 2018

      To You, With Love
      6 min read

    • Article

      A Pheasant Faux Pas

      Dec 15, 2021

      A Pheasant Faux Pas
      4 min read

    • Article

      Together At Last

      Sep 29, 2021

      Together At Last
      4 min read

    • Article

      Bloomin’ Rain

      Oct 9, 2022

      Bloomin’ Rain
      3 min read

    • Article

      ‘Real Drive And Determination’

      Dec 30, 2021

      catherine.austen@futurenet.com @cfausten123 United Pack, Selly Hall, Shropshire ONE of the great joys of hacking home with hounds is the time it gives you to ponder and rerun the events of the day. The enjoyment of hunting is as much the warm aftergl

      6 min read

    • Article

      Miss Crow Fair 2023

      Jul 18, 2023

      Miss Crow Fair 2023
      5 min read

    • Article

      Ranch Living in Tubac

      Oct 4, 2022

      Ranch Living in Tubac
      3 min read

    • Article

      Every CLOUD

      Aug 31, 2022

      Every CLOUD
      6 min read

    • Article

      In The Heart Of The Country

      May 26, 2021

      In The Heart Of The Country
      6 min read

    • Article

      Weird World Folklore Frenzy

      Oct 6, 2022

      Weird World Folklore Frenzy
      2 min read

    • Article

      Last Of The Summer Whine

      Mar 13, 2022

      Last Of The Summer Whine
      2 min read

    • Article

      Spellbinding Reads

      Nov 11, 2022

      READ THIS BY RACHEL JOYCE DOUBLEDAY In The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, the title character set off on foot on his unlikely trek across England to find his old friend Queenie Hennessy, while 1his embittered and grieving wife, Maureen, was le

      3 min read

    • Article

      Then And Now

      Jan 29, 2018

      WORDS LAURIAN BROWN I AM GOING BACK A VERY LONG WAY, TO THE MINE HOUSE IN SPRINGS WHERE I SPENT THE FIRST 10 YEARS OF MY LIFE It’s fascinating, the difference between houses then and now, and what was considered adequate, comfortable, perhaps even l

      3 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for The First Four Years

    4/5

    1,077 ratings43 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 5/5
      I love this book because it is interesting and detailed❤️??????????
    • 4/5
      It was a sweet story but lacks the depth of the other books in the series. Feels like an incomplete ending.

      2 people found this helpful

    • 5/5
      Great ending to a great series! Our family LOVED it!

      2 people found this helpful

    • 5/5
      This book tells the story of Laura and Manly's wedding and the establishment and destruction of two homesteads; one by fire and one by drought. It also is the story of the birth of their daughter, Rose as well as their son, who only lived a few months. Just great reading at any age! 144 pages

      2 people found this helpful

    • 5/5
      the story is nice and the syory was interesting.I want the story to go on. I love story's . ?

      2 people found this helpful

    • 4/5
      Wilder did not finish revising this story for publication before her death, and it has a slightly different flavour than the other books in her series. It starts out with the story of her marriage that was described in "These Happy Golden Years," but without much embellishment and with a focus on Laura's worry about the struggles of marrying a farmer. The remainder of this novel lays bare the raw emotion that Laura must have experienced in coming to grips with her new adult life as a wife and mother during a series of economic trials, stripping away the fairy tale of "happily ever after" marriage and motherhood. While my life experiences have been completely different, I could totally relate my feelings on living on my own for the first time with what Laura was going through. This is a brutally honest portrayal of what pioneer life was really like; it lacks the polish of the other books in the Little House series, along with their sense that, thanks in part to Ma and Pa, everything would always be all right, but it displays the strength of character and attitude that must have characterised struggling farmers at the time, and perhaps still does to this day.

      2 people found this helpful

    • 5/5
      sweet story of early marriage, my seven year old daughter and i enjoyed listening together.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      This book is just as wonderful as it was when I was a child. It's a whole new perspective reading it as an adult.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      This book tells the story of Laura and Manly's wedding and the establishment and destruction of two homesteads; one by fire and one by drought. It also is the story of the birth of their daughter, Rose as well as their son, who only lived a few months. Just great reading at any age! 144 pages

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      I LOVE Ittgdhgzxf hhfdfehmk gdffcvn hbddh7r33790 gwehjjerty hgfy cat dog

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      I love it so much good job. It makes you feel happy,sad, frustrated, stressed ,and disopointed.Such a good job!☺️!!!!

      1 person found this helpful

    • 2/5
      Not a full book, just a posthumously printed collection that wasn't completed. Read aloud to the boys in the car.
    • 3/5
      Well, the series ends in true Little House on the Prairie form, by which I mean this very slender volume has far more misery and disaster that feels entirely fair. It starts with the usual foibles of early married life, like Laura making a pie for a luncheon but forgetting to put sugar in it, but before long it is diphtheria, a paralysed husband, failing crops, blizzards, their first son dying in infancy, their daughter nearly drowning, and their entire house burning to the ground with all their possessions in it. And Manly feels very like Pa, with his 'oh, we'll just buy something on credit and try for another year, it will come good soon...'

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      In this novel I feel like I’m reading Laura Ingalls Wilder’s pure voice for the first time. This book, as is well known, was never edited by her daughter Rose Wilder Lane and is very different from the other Little House books. The language is more plain, but the book feels more honest.

      Rose Wilder Lane wanted to tell a story of self-reliant and successful pioneers, so one thing she did was to take out certain events, like the death of Laura’s baby brother, Charles Frederick. (Events that she wanted to take out but Wilder insisted on keeping include Mary’s blindness and the laborers’ riot near the Silver Lake settlement). By contrast, in “The First Four Years” we get a succession of setbacks and tragedies: the Wilder crop is destroyed repeatedly, their house burns down, and their infant son dies. All this is reported without sentimentality or overt drama – and certainly without uplifting lessons. There are hardly any episodes even of fun and laughter.

      It’s not that Laura and Almanzo are made to seem dour here, but their life is revealed as harsh and uncertain, with little-to-no payback or progress.

      It’s an unfinished work, of course, and merely a first draft. We can never know what Wilder herself would have done with future drafts.

      But her voice is heavily reportorial, and intensely descriptive. Much of the gift for storytelling that you see in the other books remains in this one, such as when Almanzo gets lost in a blizzard merely on his way from the barn to the house. But there’s no overarching lesson of self-reliance that shapes this book. It’s hard to see any overarching lesson at all, actually. At the very end Laura does recommit to the life of a farming family and to the persistence that it requires, but it feels like she’s embracing this commitment not because it’s an overarching faith but simply because she can hardly do anything else except go on working and living.

      This is very different from the other Little House books, and maybe this novel doesn’t come up to my favorites, but I deeply appreciate its simple honesty.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 1/5
      And so this uneven series comes to a close, with a dreadful book that shouldn't have been published. This is the original draft of a book Mrs. Wilder never published. After the death of everyone in her family, it was published as written. It reads like a scattershot diary. Some interesting events are passed over in the blink of an eye. Some uninteresting events are given great detail - especially the constant worrying about debts, and recording how much everything cost and how much wad owed. The book also suffers a bit simply by being the story of an adult instead of centering on a child or teen. But the main issue is that it was never edited to make any real form of story.For someone who is truly fascinated with the entire life of Laura Ingalls Wilder, this might be of interest, as it tells of another portion of her life. But for anyone hoping to find a well written story, interesting and entertaining, don't read this. Allow the series to end as Mrs. Wilder clearly intended, with "These Happy Golden Years."
    • 4/5
      The final book in the series is very short and covers only a brief glimpse into Laura’s new life with Manly and her daughter Rose. Their struggles to get a successful crop, avoid storms, and survive blizzards makes this book a bit bleaker than the others. I missed scenes with Pa and Ma. The pace also felt rushed, like she was skimming over their lives. There were memorable scenes, like Rose’s birth, a visit from a group a Indians, etc. As always, her simple descriptions of their life were my favorite parts. The book feels a bit like an after thought and I almost wish the series had ended with These Happy Golden Years.*After doing a bit of research, I found that this final book was published almost 30 years after the rest of the series.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      Reading this makes you realize why these sorts of stories usually end at the wedding. Still, it was Little House and it was a good read.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 2/5
      So bleak that it feels like a letdown after the delightful These Happy Golden Years.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 3/5
      Unrelievedly depressing and told at some distance further than arm's length. Interesting period detail, but so many sad things happen I can understand why Wilder didn't publish this with the rest of the series. I didn't get any real sense of who Laura was as the writing was so dispassionate as to be almost off-putting.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 3/5
      This was a nice conclusion, I suppose, but I definitely didn't like it as well as the other books. I suppose because it was so brief and zoomed thru four years, not like her other books with such attention to detail. I was heart broken for her, though, to learn her son died and about the house fire. Heavens, she was younger than I when it happened...22 or so.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 2/5
      Wilder did not edit this book for publication and it shows. It is, however, an interesting story of the early years of her marriage.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 3/5
      The final book in the series follows the first four years of Laura and Almanzo's marriage and the birth of their daughter Rose, as they try to make a living as farmers on the prairie. Published long after both Laura and Rose had died, it lacked the polish of a finished book (and possibly the editing that Rose helped out with in the earlier books.)

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      And with this book, the american classic story comes to an end. I found great pleasure in reading these wonderful books and will treasure Laura's epic family saga.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      See your favorite little girl grow up to be a mother of a growing family. The last book in the Laura series.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      Oh, this was a hard book to read. Poor Almanzo and Laura couldn't seem to catch a break. The best thing to come out of the first four years was their little girl, Rose. The story ends on a positive note, but despite that, I couldn't help feel that the overall story was melancholy.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      The last book typically included in the Little House series is the least like the others. As it was never edited, it lacks the polish that the other books have, and is more frank than any of the others about some of the harder aspects of life for the young Wilder family. It deals with drought and hard weather, plagues, disease and debt. Laura and Almanzo deal with a lot in that first four years of their married life, trying to make things thrive on their claim in De Smet four the three year trial of farming (stretched to four for a 'grace' period). Despite some of the positive things that happen for them in this book, this is definitely the saddest of the series. It is good, but not something that I could see myself going back to when I want something sweet and light-hearted.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      The prose is unpolished, and it is quite clear that Wilder was not finished with this manuscript. In comparison with her early works, it falls flat. However I am VERY glad that they went ahead and published this "unfinished" work. It was a delight following up on what happened to Laura after the last book in the Little House series. There are some very amusing and tender scenes to be found within. Overall, a delightful insight into another time and place.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      The story of Almanzo and Laura in their first four years of marriage, including the birth of Rose and the death of their son.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      this is an easy read and was fun to read

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      Laura and Almonzo discuss marriage. They marry and this is the account of the first four years of their life on the prarie. This includes the trials and tribulations of being newlyweds, having a child, and them working on the farm on the prarie to provide for their family.The plot of the book was to show how people lived in early times. I liked the characters of Laura and Alanzo how real they seemed for the setting of the story. The theme kept my interest when reading it. I really like this book. I always watched the show as a child and reading it made it all that more real. I like these books that show how people made it in the turn of the 20th century.You could use this book as activities for a classroom having them draw what they think the prarie would look like. They could also write a reflection saying if they would like to live at that time and why or why not.

      1 person found this helpful