[BOOKS] American Pioneer: Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Real-life Memoir to be Published

Posted: August 20, 2014 | Author: Pundit Planet | Filed under: Art & Culture, History, Reading Room, U.S. News | Tags: Associated Press, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Little House on the Prairie, Pamela Smith Hill, Rose Wilder Lane, South Dakota State Historical Society, South Dakota State Historical Society Press, Wilder |Leave a comment

The project’s online home has pictures of the real places in the book and the artifacts that helped tell the story.

For the LA Times, Carolyn Kellogg reports: Laura Ingalls Wilder based her beloved “Little House on the Prairie” books on her actual experiences growing up on the American plains. But they were books for children, and, sometime in the 1920s, she wrote a memoir that would have been rated R for violence and adult content.

“There’s the story of a love triangle gone awry. And a scene where a drunk man douses a room in kerosene, lights in on fire, then drags his wife through it by the hair.”

No one would publish it.

pioneergirlproject.org

Until September, when the University of South Dakota State Historical Society Press will release the memoir, with notations, as “Pioneer Girl: The Annotated Autobiography.” The Associated Press reports that it’s Wilder’s original rough draft of the book, misspellings and all, edited by Pamela Smith Hill, the author of a biography of Wilder.

There’s the story of a love triangle gone awry. And a scene where a drunk man douses a room in kerosene, lights in on fire, then drags his wife through it by the hair…(read more)

The project’s online home has pictures of the real places in the book and the artifacts that helped tell the story…(read more)

LA Times

From the South Dakota State Historical Society Press

The SDSHS Press will publish Pioneer Girl: An Annotated Edition by Pamela Smith Hill.

Laura Ingalls Wilder’s famous children’s books are available all over the world, but one of her stories has never been published. For the first time, Wilder’s autobiography will soon be available to everyone. The South Dakota State Historical Society (SDSHS) Press has successfully negotiated the worldwide, exclusive rights to publish Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Pioneer Girl.

“We are delighted to announce this major publishing event,” said Nancy Tystad Koupal, director of the SDSHS Press. “The opportunity to bring such an important work to print for the first time is an indication of the high standards to which we aspire and the success that we have achieved over the past 15 years.”

The Little House Heritage Trust, the administrators of Wilder’s Estate, granted the rights to publish Pioneer Girl to the SDSHS Press partly as a result of the Press’s award-winning 2007 biography, Laura Ingalls Wilder: A Writer’s Life, by Pamela Smith Hill. Hill and the Press collaborated once again to propose this new publication to the Trust, which was pleased to partner with the Press in making Wilder’s autobiography available to the public for the first time…(read more)