(NYTBR) ... When a steer’s leg came crashing through its sod ceiling, Wilder wrote that Ma and Laura “laughed because it was funny to live in a house where a steer could step through the roof. It was like being rabbits.”
The Caseys’ dugout was less jolly: “scorpions, lizards, snakes, gophers, centi­pedes and moles wormed their way out of our walls and ceilings.” In rainstorms, Walls writes, “the dugout turned to mud. Sometimes clumps of that mud dropped from the ceiling and you had to put it back in place.” Once, during an Easter dinner, a rattlesnake dropped onto the table, and Lily’s father took a break from carving the ham to chop off its head.
Wilder’s stories have acquired such mythic power (in “The Glass Castle,” Walls lists them among her favorite childhood books) that it can be easy to forget how many American families shared similar histories, each with their own touchstones of calamity, endurance and hard-won reward. Continued

Photos: 1. Oklahoma dugout c1909 (Library of Congress). 2. The Faro Caudill [family] eating dinner in their dugout, Pie Town, New Mexico 1940 (Russell Lee/Library of Congress)