Children's books about late-19^th-century poverty made a comeback during another historic period of economic hardship: the Great Depression. Three years after the 1929 stock-market crash, Little House in the Big Woods, the first in Laura Ingalls Wilder's series of novels about her family's life in the 1870s, was published. The second book in the series, Little House on the Prairie, appeared in 1935 and won the Newbery Medal in 1936.

Wilder's novels enjoyed huge success during the 1930s, despite the fact that many Americans were finding it hard to keep food on the table, much less books on the shelves. Perhaps this was because the magnitude of Ingalls' hardships was so extreme as to put the financial struggles of the Great Depression in perspective. There may have been a proverbial "wolf at the door" for many families in the 1930s, but for the Ingalls, there was an actual wolf—several, in fact. It could also have been because, just like those peppy little Peppers, the Ingalls kids always kept striving to please Pa and Ma, even if it meant trudging through blizzards.