Caroline Fraser
American writer
Caroline Fraser is an American writer. She won the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography, and the 2017 National Book Critics Circle Award in Biography, for Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder, a biography of American author Laura Ingalls Wilder.
Early life and education
Fraser was born in Seattle to a Christian Science family. In 1979 she graduated from Mercer Island High School, and in 1987 she earned a PhD in English and American literature from Harvard University for a thesis entitled A Perfect Contempt: The Poetry of James Merrill.
Career
Formerly on the editorial staff of the New Yorker, Fraser's work has also appeared in The Atlantic Monthly and New York Review of Books, among others. She is the author of God's Perfect Child: Living and Dying in the Christian Science Church (1999), which describes the practices of the Christian Science church and her upbringing within it. Whitney Balliett, himself a former Christian Scientist, described the book as a "critical history that ... casts a clear, merciless light" on the religion.
Fraser's other books are Rewilding the World: Dispatches from the Conservation Revolution (2009), which presents a broad vision of global ecological conservation; and Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder (2017), the Pulitzer Prize-winning book about the life of Laura Ingalls Wilder. She is also the editor of the two volumes of the Library of America's Laura Ingalls Wilder: The Little House Books (2012).
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Caroline Fraser” is american writer. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Caroline, Fraser and American, not as a finished interpretation.
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Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 25, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5045071. VIAF identifies the subject as 227840600. The Library of Congress control number is n99007595. None of the 2 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2018, 2017, 1979 and 1987.
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This entry incorporates text from “Caroline Fraser” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.