Murderland: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers

Caroline Fraser is an award-winning writer and literary critic best known for her biographies and her work on environmental issues. Born in 1963 and raised in Seattle, Washington, Caroline Fraser was living in the Pacific Northwest while the murder sprees she describes in Murderland were taking place. Fraser attended college in Los Angeles, California, before completing a PhD in English and American literature from Harvard University. She briefly worked on the editorial staff of The New Yorker and has contributed articles to The Atlantic Monthly and The New York Review of Books.

Fraser is best known for her 2017 book Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder, a comprehensive biography of the author of the Little House on the Prairie series. The biography situates Wilder’s life within the broader context of US history, including westward expansion, environmental change, and political currents in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In 2018, Fraser was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in Biography and the National Book Critics Circle Award in Biography for Prairie Fires. Like Murderland, Prairie Fires combines biography and environmental research. Fraser challenges the idyllic vision of life on the Great Plains that the Little House on the Prairie series portrays, showing how the family’s self-sufficiency would have been essentially impossible given the area’s harsh conditions, resource scarcity, and rapid demographic change.