Nellie Oleson is a fictional character in the Little House series of autobiographical children's novels written by Laura Ingalls Wilder.
Nellie's parents, Margaret (1836–1908) Owens and William (1836–1920) did, as Ingalls describes, run the local mercantile in Walnut Grove, Minnesota.
[2][3] The second girl, Genevieve Masters, was born November 12, 1867, in Hornby, Steuben County, New York[2] and was the spoiled daughter of Laura's former teacher.
[2] Nellie Oleson appeared in three of the Little House novels: On the Banks of Plum Creek (1937), Little Town on the Prairie (1939), and These Happy Golden Years (1943) — the fourth, seventh, and eighth in the series.
Played by actress Alison Arngrim, Nellie Oleson was a manipulative, witty, sharp-tongued character on the NBC television show, Little House on the Prairie.
Her parents, Nels and Harriet Oleson, owned the mercantile in the small town of Walnut Grove, set in post-Civil War Minnesota.
Early in the series, the character of Nellie closely resembled her counterpart from the books - mainly as portrayed in On the Banks of Plum Creek.
[citation needed] Arngrim's character grew in importance during the series (as did the roles of the entire Oleson family) as she served as a perfect antagonist to honest, tomboyish Laura Ingalls, played by Melissa Gilbert.
Nellie and Laura feuded during their school years together, which was at times comically paralleled with quarreling between the two girls' mothers, Harriet Oleson and Caroline Ingalls (Karen Grassle).
Eventually, Nels and Harriet hired Percival Dalton (played by Steve Tracy) to help Nellie learn how to cook and run the restaurant.
Nellie—who retained her pleasant personality seen in her later years—returned in the ninth season and met Nancy, who briefly ran away from home when she (mistakenly) believed that her adoptive parents loved Nellie more than her.
When Nellie first meets Nancy and sees how she acts, she asks her parents in shock: "I know I was temperamental at her age, but I wasn't that bad... was I?"
[citation needed] Compared to the book On the Banks of Plum Creek, the series presented Nellie Oleson as a much more prominent character.
Eventually, the "villainous duo" of mother Harriet and daughter Nellie proved to be very popular with viewers for their often evil, yet humorous, antics.