They get lots of photographs of the characters from the books, plus maps, backstories and details about what happened to even quite minor characters in the books. What readers get is social and historical context. But there is far more to this publication than the book she wrote included are notes that the researchers, headed by editor Pamela Smith Hill, have added.

After more than 80 years, Laura's first and original book, which is the source of all her other books, is available. The result is Pioneer Girl: The Annotated Autobiography. It was very popular, but nobody should be under any illusion that it bore any but the most tenuous links to the books.įor several years, a number of people at the South Dakota Historical Society have been working on Laura and Rose's papers. In the 1970s, the American TV series Little House on the Prairie ran for several years and is still repeated today. By the time she died, in 1957, the mailbox on her property was enormous it had to be to facilitate all the fan letters. Pioneer Girl, although never published in either of their lifetimes, was to be the source of much of the material Laura mined for her books. I wasn't sure if I was ready for so much reality. It was a strange and disconcerting feeling to finally look at the solemn face of the real, grown-up Wilder in The First Four Years.

His sketches were beautiful and atmospheric (he also illustrated EB White's Charlotte's Web), but they lacked the visual punch a photograph can deliver. My visual impressions of her recreated childhood and adolescence was via the masterly pencil drawings of Garth Williams, who illustrated all the books in the 1950s. I was well into my teenage years before I ever saw a photograph of Wilder.

The log cabin home of Laura Ingalls Wilder in Lund, Mississippi River Valley, Wisconsin. Photograph: Laura Ingalls Wilder Historic Home and Museum As the years have passed, modern readers have gained access to an entire wealth of supplementary material via the internet that has served to enrich the experience of reading the books. The final instalment, The First Four Years, about Laura's first years of marriage, was published posthumously in 1971. The series has charmed, engaged and fascinated readers since Little House in the Big Woods was published in 1932. The seven books document her roving pioneer childhood, where home can be a covered wagon, a log cabin, a shanty, a dug-out, rooms over a store or a hotel. The Little House books, which start when Laura is two and end when she is 22, have sold millions of copies and been translated into almost 40 languages. The dedication in Pioneer Girl: The Annotated Autobiography, is 'for generations of readers inspired by Laura Ingalls Wilder's life and work'. It is written for everyone who grew up loving Laura Ingalls Wilder's classic Little House books about her pioneer childhood in the US of the 1880s.

Little house on the prairie book order