Laura Ingalls Wilder’s memoir of her pioneer girlhood, written in 1930, has remained unpublished until now.
In 1930, Laura Ingalls Wilder decided to write a memoir of her pioneer girlhood. She was a sixty-three-year-old chicken farmer, living in the Ozarks with her husband and their daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, a well-known journalist and popular author. Wilder’s own literary ambitions were, she told Lane, for “prestige” rather than for money, and they may have dated to her youth, though they had been thwarted by a married life of hardship and calamity.
Wilder would certainly capture the big market. She lived to the age of ninety, and published eight novels for young people—the perennially beloved “Little House” books—that have sold some sixty million copies in more than thirty languages. In the nineteen-seventies, the third installment of this family saga, “Little House on the Prairie,” was adapted as a drama for television that ran for nine seasons. The Wilder farmhouse, in Rocky Ridge, Missouri, has become a shrine that receives some forty thousand pilgrims a year, and six other sites mentioned in the series are landmarks or museums devoted to its lore. But the memoir that Wilder drafted during the first year of the Depression, in her tidy longhand, filling a series of school notebooks, was never published until now.
“Pioneer Girl: The Annotated Autobiography” is a handsomely illustrated, large-format volume that represents years of work by a team of scholars. Their project was sponsored by the South Dakota Historical Society, and published by its state-subsidized press last November. Its modest first print run quickly sold out, and it is currently back-ordered on Amazon, where it occupies the number one slot on the best-seller list in the category of American biography. Wilder fans are a devoted breed, and there is nothing surprising about the book’s popularity—until you wade into it.
My greatest trouble this spring was that I couldn’t get past the multiplication table at school. I just couldn’t memorize it and we couldn’t go on to arithmetic until we could say the multiplication table. Those who passed were going up stairs next terms and I would have to stay behind. So I was glad when Ma said she needed me to help her and I would have to stay out of school for a while.
I helped Ma with the work, ran errands and every day worked sums in multiplication looking back at the multiplication table to help me when I couldn’t remember.
One day when I came back from an errand that had taken me a long time, I found a new little sister.
Wilder desperately needed an editor, and luckily she had one—if not something more. Rose Wilder Lane’s astute and rigorous biographer, William Holtz, made a persuasive case, in “The Ghost in the Little House,” that Lane was her mother’s ghostwriter. She encouraged Wilder to recast the memoir as a series of “juveniles,” and, in the course of a decade, they cannibalized, sanitized, and romanticized “Pioneer Girl” for the “Little House” books. At least initially, however, it was Lane who shaped the narratives and polished the prose.
Pamela Smith Hill, the project leader and editor of “Pioneer Girl,” is a prominent Wilder scholar, and a passionate advocate for her subject. In her introduction to the memoir, she acknowledges Lane’s role as a midwife. But she also defends the integrity of Wilder’s authorship against the slurs, as she sees them, of Holtz and others. It is difficult to reconcile Hill’s perception of Wilder’s “evolution as a writer,” her “descriptive genius,” and her techniques for creating “tension and suspense” with the evidence of the manuscript. “Some critics,” she concludes, “have charged that Wilder could not write.” One has to agree with them.
The mother and daughter behind the Little House stories.