‘Pioneer Girl: The Annotated Autobiography’: Book is a must for any Ingalls fan

In 1929, when Laura Ingalls Wilder was 63 years old, she sat down with a pencil and six writing tablets and wrote the story of her life growing up on the prairie. The non-fiction manuscript, titled Pioneer Girl, was written for adults and would become the foundation for Wilder's entire Little House series, as well as her daughter Rose's most famous novels.

But Wilder's original manuscript was never published - until now. Editor Pamela Smith Hill and her team at the South Dakota Historical Society compiled 'Pioneer Girl: The Annotated Autobiography.” This book includes not only Wilder's first work in its entirety, but detailed annotations noting later edits, developments, and revisions.

A must for the true Wilder fan, Pioneer Girl is the Rosetta Stone of Wilder's complete work: once you read it, you will know the author - and the author's work - like never before.

Told in Wilder's spare but lyrical style, the manuscript includes condensed versions of stories that would become entire books, such as the family's interactions with native populations in the big woods and the terrifying long winter they spent cooped up in a South Dakota store building. Pioneer Girl is a remarkable read because it sheds light on what so many Wilder readers wondered for so long - which stories in these fictitious children's books are true?

With so many annotations, maps, and an extensive introduction, Pioneer Girl is not for the casual reader. But it is a book to be treasured by Wilder's longtime fans, as well as by writers who appreciate a keen, honest look at the role between writer and editor, and the process of transforming facts into suspenseful, historical non-fiction.

Above all, the book is a grand success. As stated in the introduction, 'Pioneer Girl does what Wilder had asked her aunt Martha Carpenter to do back in 1925; it tells the story in her ‘own words as you would tell about those times if only you could talk to me.'”