Before noon, Pa said, "Whoa!" The wagon stopped. "Here we are, Caroline. Right here we'll build our house." Laura and Mary scrambled over the feedbox and dropped to the ground in a hurry. All around there was nothing but grassy prairie spreading to the edge of the sky.

(Little House on the Prairie, chapter five)

A long time ago, when this journalist was a little girl in 70s London suburbia, the fairytale prose of Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House on the Prairie and its heroine with identical dark plaits captured my imagination and fuelled a lifelong fascination with the American wild west. My friend Reena and I re-enacted it for hours in the tall trees at the end of her garden, each of us taking multiple parts.

To be honest, it was the long-running TV series that I knew, with its "prairie bitch" Nellie Oleson, the rich storekeeper's daughter who bullied the good-hearted Laura and her country family episode after episode. A kind of Louisa May Alcott with catfights: Desperate Little Women.

I finally bought the nine out-of-print Puffins with their famous Garth Williams illustrations on eBay two years ago. At first I found what I had expected; happy tales of semi-autobiographical childhood pleasures based on family bonds and the seasons: a corn cob for a doll, sugaring parties after the maple syrup had been gathered, a house and life made entirely by their own hands – Pa even made his own bullets; only the nails were "boughten".

Laura Ingalls Wilder in the 1930s. Photograph: Bettmann/Corbis

Appropriately enough, the first book, Little House in the Big Woods, was a great success in 1932, marketed as "the book the depression couldn't stop". In the epilogue to The First Four Years, the ninth and final book in the series, Wilder wrote: "In the seventh year a mysterious catastrophe was worldwide. All banks failed. From coast to coast the factories shut down and business ceased. This was a panic." There is a current credit-crunch vogue for Manhattanites to rediscover the Little House books with their own apartment-dwelling daughters.

Here was a woman who recognised "that in my own life I represented a whole period of American history". Born in 1867, just two years after the end of the civil war, Wilder was part of a pioneer family who moved west to farm the "unpopulated" western prairies. She lived through the coming of the railroad, the mass eviction of the Osage Indian tribe (documented in Little House on the Prairie) and the rise of Elvis Presley. She died aged 90 in 1957, just seven months before the launch of Sputnik. Having slowly grown in prosperity after the great 1893 panic and banking collapse, she and her husband Almanzo Wilder saw their life savings wiped out in the 1929 Wall Street Crash.

Her novels – progressively darker and more ambivalent – revealed a woman with a robust hatred of debt and credit, and a deep suspicion that only the government and rich financiers back east made any money out of the great land-rush dream. She married in her black cashmere dress to save the trouble and expense of an elaborate wedding, and refused to say "I obey" in her marriage vows, defying social convention. She wrote, "I could not obey anybody against my better judgment" – a view possibly forged by watching her mother suffer from her father's disastrous financial decisions.

While she often writes of her desire to be "free like the Indians", riding bareback, Little House on the Prairie is built illegally on occupied Osage Indian land and the family live in fear of a massacre. Her father's bad judgment forces him to abandon it before they are evicted by federal troops. He buys a Minnesota farm, apparently oblivious to the regular plagues of grasshoppers that, combined with prairie fires and duststorms, drive the Ingalls into crushing debt.

She then documents heartrending hardship in The First Four Years, which dealt with her early married life and was published posthumously in 1971. The couple are burdened by a massive mortgage; drought, hailstorms and fires destroy their farmhouse and then Almanzo is crippled at 31 by diphtheria. The book tells of the secret sorrows of women. In one incident Wilder recounts her horror as their desperate childless neighbours the Boasts offer her their best horse in return for her baby daughter, Rose. Wilder herself lost her only son in infancy.

"It's a queer country out here. Strange things happen." Pa in "These Happy Golden Years" Wilder, who was by her 50s an experienced farming journalist, brought an artist's eye to the remarkable events she'd witnessed.Wilder also pioneered new literary terrain, including the very first young adult fiction in the later novels – including Little Town on the Prairie and These Happy Golden Years – which document Laura's teenage anxieties and romance with touchingly modern woes. Memorably she describes her self-loathing for the "short round girl", she sees in the mirror, when she longs to be like slender, willowy blonde Nellie (who really does try to steal her boyfriend). She had to push her publishers hard for the books to be branded and marketed as a series; when they were, they proved a great model for future book marketing. Brought up to be a sentimental Victorian on Walter Scott's novels and Tennyson's poetry, Wilder turned out to be as sharp and no-nonsense a businesswoman in her own way as the feisty Hollywood characters being played on screen in the 30s by the likes of Bette Davis and Joan Crawford.

Wilder has a special status in American culture despite posthumous allegations of racism. The Osage nation, according to biographer Pamela Smith Hill, still condemns her work, which was based on their eviction. The novels are full of phrases that are unacceptable today, even in her own lifetime Wilder apologised for her thoughtlessness and amended a line in Little House on the Prairie that said Kansas had "no people, only Indians". It now reads, "no settlers, only Indians".

The various sites where her family lived in Wisconsin, Kansas, Dakota and Missouri are now much-visited museums. There is an industry of books and merchandise churned out by her daughter's heirs. The trio of child stars from the TV series have recently published their own Gen X memoirs of growing up on screen – notably Alison "Nasty Nellie" Arngrim's delightfully titled Confessions of a Prairie Bitch. There is a musical. I'm sure Wilder, who once ran for political office and ran a local bureau administering farm loans, would have loved the fact that the TV "Laura", Melissa Gilbert, grew up to head the powerful Screen Actors' Guild. Even Rocky Ridge Farm, in the Ozarks, Wilder's final home for 55 years, hosts a biannual "Laurapalooza" celebration.

But it seems to me impossible to read the books without appreciating the integrity of one woman's view of a remarkable and sometimes cruel century. One day I know I will take my own family on a pilgrimage to Rocky Ridge Farm, built entirely out of local materials, with its teeny kitchen handmade to suit Wilder's 4ft 11in frame. Her books, like the Thanksgiving holiday yesterday, are a celebration of endurance and survival in the face of disaster – natural and manmade. As Wilder wrote of her family in Little House in the Big Woods: "They could not be forgotten, she thought, because now is now. It can never be a long time ago."

Samira Ahmed is a Channel 4 News presenter. Laura Ingalls Wilder is her specialist subject on Celebrity Mastermind on BBC1 this Christmas.