Each year, the National Endowment for the Humanities identifies a theme important to the nation’s heritage and selects fifteen books that embody that theme. In addition to introducing young readers to good literature, these books promote understanding of abstract or general ideas through the power of particular stories.
This year’s theme is “the pursuit of happiness.” These Happy Golden Years is one of the selected titles. Previous themes have been “Courage” (Little House on the Prairie was one of the titles), “Freedom,” and “Becoming American.”
A collection of the fifteen 2007 titles will be awarded to 2,000 libraries across the United States through a competitive grant application. Here are the 2007 titles a library can win copies of:
Grades K-3 – Aesop’s Fables (Aesop), Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel (Virginia Lee Burton) – (uh, do kids even know what a steam shovel or steam heat IS these days?), Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening (poem by Robert Frost); Grades 4-6 – Tuck Everlasting (Natalie Babbitt), The Great Migration (Jacob Lawrence), These Happy Golden Years (Laura Ingalls Wilder), Journal of Wong Ming-Chung (Laurence Yep); Grades 7-8 – Carry On, Mr. Bowditch (Jean Lee Latham), A Wrinkle in Time (Madeleine L’Engle), Esperanza Rising (Pam Munoz Ryan); Grades 9-12 – Kindred (Octavia Butler), O Pioneers! (Willa Cather), The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald), Common Sense (Thomas Paine). As a bonus, winners will also receive a copy of the “Happy Land” CD of “Little House” music (which, btw, contains one song from the book, These Happy Golden Years).
What? No Happy Feet or Happy Meals?
My first thought was this: “Is These Happy Golden Years a book about the pursuit of happiness?” To me, it’s more about a book in which Laura must endure something that gives her no happiness whatsoever (teaching school), so that she can return home, which has always been a happy place for her. Then she leaves her happy home to marry Almanzo Wilder, but her rationalization there is that she “would need never be homesick for the old home. It was so hear that she could go to it whenever she wished.” (See Chapter 33, “Little Gray Home in the West”)
The song from which the title is taken (“Golden Years are Passing By”) isn’t even a song about the pursuit of happiness. It’s a reminder that the happy years of the past are something to be remembered.
Laura Ingalls Wilder doesn’t mention happiness all that much in These Happy Golden Years. The first (Chapter 3) is when Laura dreams she is at home and Mary makes a happy comment. Alas, it is only a dream and Laura wakes up as miserable as ever. In other chapters, Laura is happy simply to be visiting at her home weekends – a home that is always a much happier place than at the Brewsters’ shanty.
Laura is happy to be home for a visit to hear Pa’s fiddle music (Chapter 4), but again, she must leave that happiness to continue teaching. She is also happy to be home (Chapter 4), simply to do ordinary chores, such as ironing. Later (Chapter 8), she is happy to be at home for the weekend, in the happy kitchen. Finally, when her term at the Brewster School is finished (Chapter 11), it is “happier than Christmas” because she is home. Being home makes her so happy, she has to sing. “Laura thought how happy and how fortunate she was. Nothing anywhere could be better than being at home with the home folks, she was sure.” (Chapter 12)
No pursuit. Just returning to.
Laura’s time at the Perry School is a happy one (Chapter 18) simply because she is at home in the evenings. Neither love nor happiness is ever mentioned in connection with Laura’s engagement to Almanzo Wilder.
Don’t get me wrong; I’m thrilled that yet another “Little House” book is selected for this honor. Just maybe not in a contest for “pursuit of happiness” books. To me, that would be any book in which the Ingalls family is traveling west!
As for “happiness” books I’m familiar with, I could think of the “Happy Hollisters” books
Yes, I spent some time trying to figure out some “pursuit of happiness” books. I want to look up a copy of the following: Happy as a Clam, and 9,999 other Similes (Larry Wright) and C’mon, Get Happy: Fear and Loating on the Partridge Family Bus (David Cassidy), the former because I like that sort of thing and the later because I used to love “The Partridge Family.” I do have a copy of Happy Trails: Our Life Story (Roy Rogers and Dale Evans), and I think maybe I am in need of a copy of W.F. Fing’s (Fuck, Yes! A Guide to the Happy Acceptance of Everything.
Am I missing something? In your opinion, IS These Happy Golden Years a “pursuit of happiness” book?
