From rough drafts and fragments, to multiple edited typescripts, to corrected galley proofs, each of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House books is unique in the manuscript material that survives to document it. Little House in the Big Woods is possibly the most well documented because it derives so directly from Wilder’s autobiography, Pioneer Girl. One can easily follow the transfer of Pa’s stories, character dialogue, visits with friends and relatives, and fashions of the period from the autobiography to the novel. Sometimes whole blocks of material are transferred, but at other times, small snippets of detail from later parts of the autobiography have been patched together with Wisconsin memories to create new scenes. For example, in chapter 2 of Big Woods (pp. 29–33), Wilder combined her memories of playing house as a four-year-old with household jobs she performed as a teenager in Dakota Territory, using the familiar rhyme that begins “Wash on Monday.”¹

Wilder recorded her childhood memories, which became Pioneer Girl, on these lined tablets. South Dakota Historical Society Press

The aunts’ preparations for the dance in chapter 8 of Big Woods contains Wilder’s memories of the clothes she wore during her courtship with Almanzo. The aunts “pulled on their beautiful white stockings, that they had knit of fine cotton thread in lacy, openwork patterns.” As they tightened each other’s corsets, Aunt Docia remarked, “Caroline says Charles could span her waist with his hands, when they were married” (BW, pp. 139–40). These details originally appeared in Pioneer Girl, where, as Wilder dressed for a Sunday afternoon buggy ride with Almanzo, Caroline Ingalls chided her teenage daughter for not wearing her corsets tightly enough. Wilder then put on her “white cotton open-work” stockings and her “black and high and buttoned” shoes.²

Wilder wrote her later novels at this writing desk in the Rocky Ridge farmhouse near Mansfield, Missouri. Visible on the desk is the envelope, containing the typescript, that Harper & Brothers returned to Wilder. South Dakota Historical Society Press

Other clues to the development and evolution of Big Woods occur in a stand-alone document housed at the Laura Ingalls Wilder Home Association in Mansfield, Missouri. This final typescript of the novel reveals the work of the editors who shepherded the book into print. Harper & Brothers returned it to Wilder about six months after the book was published, possibly at the author’s request. The document shows, for example, that Marion Fiery at Alfred A. Knopf began editing the manuscript before it went to Harper & Brothers. Fiery, who had asked Wilder’s literary agent for “permission to change Pa and Ma to Father and Mother excepting in dialogue,”³ had replaced the informal “Pa” with “her father” in three narrative sentences on page 2 of the typescript, from which Harper & Brothers eventually set the book. Fiery’s faint pencil changes are clearly different from the bold marks of the Harper’s copyeditor, but the typesetter did not differentiate between the two. He or she integrated Fiery’s alterations along with the copyeditor’s, so that page 3 of Big Woods incorporates Fiery’s formal usage in the narrative, while the rest of the book uses the informal “Pa” in both dialogue and text.⁴ This final typescript, which Wilder submitted as “Little House in the Woods,” also makes clear when the title of the book became Little House in the Big Woods.

The title page of Chapter 5 in Wilder’s manuscript of On the Banks of Plum Creek. South Dakota Historical Society Press

When Little House in the Big Woods went into production, Wilder moved on to Farmer Boy, but her autobiography sheds few clues about the evolution of that book, which is about her husband’s childhood. Instead, the author’s handwritten manuscript, notes, fragments, and a surviving typescript offer the researcher valuable clues about how Wilder’s second novel developed. Pioneer Girl becomes important again when Wilder returned to her own life story in Little House on the Prairie, which also survives in various drafts. During the writing and editing of On the Banks of Plum Creek and By the Shores of Silver Lake, a rich body of correspondence between Wilder and Lane, along with the remaining manuscripts, reveals much about the evolution of those books. For later novels, original manuscripts and typed versions with questions from Lane and hand-written responses from Wilder demonstrate a lively give-and-take between author and editor.⁵ In the end, no matter what Wilder sources the researcher has available, the revelations are always plentiful and fascinating.

―Nancy Tystad Koupal

1. Koupal, ed., Pioneer Girl: The Path into Fiction (Pierre: South Dakota Historical Society Press, 2023), p. 79.
2. Ibid., pp. 122–23.
3. Quoted in George T. Bye to Lane, Oct. 27, 1931, file 11, box 1, Rose Wilder Lane Papers, Herbert Hoover Presidential Library, West Branch, Iowa.
4. Wilder, “Little House in the Big Woods” typescript, p. 2, Laura Ingalls Wilder Home Association, Mansfield, Mo.; Koupal, ed., Pioneer Girl: The Path into Fiction, pp. 69–70n7.
5. The annotations in Wilder, Pioneer Girl: The Revised Texts, ed. Nancy Tystad Koupal et al. (Pierre: South Dakota Historical Society Press, 2021), dive deeply into the surviving manuscript material to offer insights into the connections between Wilder’s autobiography and her later books. The bulk of the materials discussed in this paragraph are housed either in the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library in West Branch, Iowa (the Lane Papers), or in the Laura Ingalls Wilder Papers at the Wilder Home Association, Mansfield, Mo. (available on microfilm as Collection 3633 from the State Historical Society of Missouri, Columbia).