Caroline Fraser


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 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, 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, which presents a broad vision of global ecological conservation; and , 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.

Awards and honors

Books