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Laura Ingalls Wilder Autobiography To Be Released, Little House on the Prairie author Laura Ingalls Wilder died in 1957 but her autobiography, Prairie Girl: The Annotated Autobiography just found a publisher! The South Dakota State Historical Society Press is releasing the book on Monday, November 17, 2014.
“People grew up reading her books and then they grew up watching her TV show and I think that this is just more information on Laura Ingalls Wilder’s story,” South Dakota Historical Society Press Marketing Director Jennifer McIntyre said.
So the South Dakota Historical Society Press expects eager fans of Laura Ingalls Wilder to devour “Pioneer Girl: The Annotated Autobiography” as soon as it hits store shelves. It’s based upon a manuscript Ingalls Wilder wrote in 1930. But this isn’t the Little House on the Prairie you read as a kid.
“It’s not something that’s risque or adult-content, it’s that she wasn’t writing for children, she was writing for an adult audience, so she didn’t use third-person like she did in her novels, she was writing in first-person, she didn’t use simple sentence structures, she was just telling her story,” McIntyre.
A story told with a number-two pencil. One of the challenges in compiling Pioneer Girl was deciphering some of Ingalls Wilder’s handwritten notes.
“Most of the time, she seemed to write very clearly, but there were some words that all of us in the office would have to gather around and kind of try and figure out what she actually wrote, just because they were faded or as she was writing the manuscript it was just the free-flow of thought,” McIntyre said.
Ingalls Wilder was never able to get the original manuscript published. But she mined her memoir for stories she included in the Little House books. Now, readers will gain a more realistic insight into frontier life through the Pioneer Girl back-story.
The South Dakota Historical Society Press even has an international distributor to get copies of the book to readers in other countries.
Agencies/Canadajournal
The book is priced at $39.95. It will be available in bookstores, online and directly from the historical society.