Annotated autobiography

Hidden away since the 1930s, Laura Ingalls Wilder s never-before-published autobiography reveals the true stories of her pioneering life.
Follow the real Laura Ingalls and her family as they make their way west and discover that truth is as remarkable as fiction.
“Pioneer Girl: The Annotated Autobiography offers Wilder's complete first draft of her own story, enhanced by scrupulous and wide-ranging new research.

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Lucy and Todd

Think you have to produce all your masterpieces by the age of 35, just because Mozart did? Take heart, Johnny-come-latelys. Laura Ingalls Wilder didn’t sit down to write her memoir of her first sixteen years until 1930, when she was already sixty-three. She had previously written only short pieces for local papers, including a ‘poultry column’ that covered various aspects of rural life (not just chickens). The stream of eight novels for children that soon poured forth (starting with Little House in the Big Woods) originated in this first attempt, Pioneer Girl, written for adults and rejected by every agent and editor who saw it. The South Dakota Historical Society Press has now produced a lavishly annotated, illustrated and curiously engrossing edition of this previously unpublished manuscript, transcribed from six yellowing writing tablets.

But most of Wilder’s tales, familiar from the novels, flop on to these pages in an emaciated state. Saying things to one’s own satisfaction isn’t the same as reaching the reader. There’s a big flatness problem here. He

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The Pioneer Girl Project

In the fall of 2010, when I was director of the South Dakota Historical Society (SDHS) Press and negotiating for the right to publish Laura Ingalls Wilder’s autobiography under the title Pioneer Girl: The Annotated Autobiography, I optimistically told our marketing director that I hoped it might eventually sell 30,000 copies. He scoffed at the idea, considering it absurd. I cited the Mark Twain autobiography from the University of California Press that was doing so well—about 45,000 copies at that point and counting. Yeah, he retorted, but Twain was an American classic; Wilder was a regional children’s author. Maybe we could sell 10,000, he conceded. As it turns out, we were both wrong! Ten years later, SDHS Press has published three additional Pioneer Girl-related books and sold 200,000 copies of the original title. The Press has, in short, exceeded its wildest expectations.

Let me give you a little context. As a not-for-profit, scholarly publisher, SDHS Press typically printed about 1,000 copies of any book, with the exception of its children’s t

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Pioneer Girl: The Annotated Autobiography

June 2, 2016

(UPDATE: After reading other people's reviews here, I'm absolutely delighted by how many angry writeups there are along the lines of, "I can't believe this annotated edition has so many annotations!!!" That's the entire point of an annotated edition, to bring a scholarly look at all the facts and figures that are being presented within the manuscript itself; if you were to move all of them to the back of the book, they would be footnotes and you would therefore not call it an annotated edition. For those who haven't read it themselves yet, let me do you a favor and mention that you are under no legal obligation whatsoever to actually read the annotations in the annotated edition, but instead can simply just read Wilder's manuscript as if it was a standalone book, a fact that somehow escaped the attention of a whole lot of one-star reviewers here.)

(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being rep