A Storybook Summer

Inspired by three of America’s most beloved female writers, photographer Greta Rybus visits their childhood homes, now museums, to understand their lives anew.

- ASA CANTY

Tim Sullivan, co-owner of the Ingalls Homestead.

YOU NEVER FORGET the first chapter books you read by yourself. Like many, I spent days getting lost in Little House on the Prairie, Laura Ingalls Wilder’s semi-autobiographical rendering of her family’s westward journey and frontier life; Little Women, Louisa May Alcott’s classic tale about four creative sisters navigating the transition to adulthood in 1860s Massachusetts; and Maud Hart Lovelace’s beloved series Betsy-Tacy, considered among the first YA novels, chronicling two best friends growing up together at the turn of the 20th century.

Copies of prairie-style dresses that Laura Ingalls Wilder would have worn.

These authors decided that their lives were worth writing down—and, in the process, gave us a window into American history as seen through the eyes of young women.

Inside the Surveyors' House, the first home of the Ingalls family in South Dakota.

Last summer, I visited the small towns in which Wilder, Alcott, and Lovelace grew up, where their childhood homes are still preserved. At each stop, I met adults like me for whom the stories had meant so much, and young children reading them for the first time. They clutched their hardcovers. They wore dresses inspired by their favorite characters. And then, they visited the gift shop to gather writing tools all their own.

A young reader explores the Ingalls Homestead.