It was the sight of Pa Ingalls’ fiddle in a museum that set Carole Nebhut’s heart aflutter.

“Just somebody give me a chair, and I’ll sit here next to the fiddle for the rest of the afternoon. It was profound,” recalls Ms. Nebhut, a retired educator in Aston, Pennsylvania, of the moment when she saw the instrument, which she considers the “only character in the book still alive and functioning.”

Ms. Nebhut is what one might call a superfan of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s book series, “Little House on the Prairie.” For nearly a century, readers like Ms. Nebhut have followed the Ingalls family as it traveled deep into the Western territories and settled among the Osage people in the late 1800s.

Now, “Little House” fans have another opportunity to revisit the story. On Thursday, Netflix is launching an eight-episode series of “Little House on the Prairie,” a new adaptation of Wilder’s semiautobiographical books, produced by CBS Studios and Anonymous Content.

This nostalgic story of a white American frontier family using ingenuity to survive hardship has resonated with readers, particularly schoolchildren, since the first book in the series, “Little House in the Big Woods,” was published in 1932. The nine-book “Little House” series has sold more than 73 million copies in more than 100 countries and has been translated into at least 27 languages, according to figures published by Netflix. The 1974 TV series, which ran for nine seasons and 204 episodes, continues to draw viewers, garnering 13.25 billion minutes of viewing on Peacock in 2024 alone, 50 years after it first aired, according to Nielsen.

Despite the series’ enduring and global popularity, Wilder has had her share of critics. Many scholars say Wilder’s original works and their depictions of homesteaders and Native Americans on the Western Plains are largely fictionalized, inspired by her own memories and stories told by her father, Charles Ingalls, and edited by her daughter, Rose Wilder. Wilder has been criticized so often for the pejorative descriptions of Indigenous people in the book series that in 2018, a division of the American Library Association removed her name from a prestigious achievement award for children’s literature.

The rebooted Netflix show addresses criticisms of Wilder’s work by giving diverse characters a larger role, a decision that prompted some to argue that the series would misrepresent the original books by portraying modern, progressive sensibilities. Rebecca Sonnenshine, the series’ writer and executive producer, says she feels the emphasis on community and family in her remake is the same spirit found in the book series and the original TV show. “We needed community, to help others and to ask for help. That’s how we are able to … not just survive, but find joy and love in our lives, to find purpose and meaning,” she says.