“Pioneer Girl: The Annotated Autobiography” is Now an eBook

The South Dakota Historical Society Press has released Pioneer Girl: The Annotated Autobiography by Laura Ingalls Wilder and edited by Pamela Smith Hill as an eBook, containing all the annotations, maps, and illustrations found in the hardcover edition.

PG cover 72dpi 220px“The eBook is the perfect format for researchers and readers on the go,” says Nancy Tystad Koupal, director of the Pioneer Girl Project and the South Dakota Historical Society Press. “It contains the numerous annotations, which are linked so that the reader can jump from Wilder’s words to the editors’ comments and back, along with the illustrations, maps and appendices that make the autobiography so valuable.” The eBook also allows readers to access website homepages cited throughout the text with one easy click.

In 2015, Pioneer Girl: The Annotated Autobiography reached the No. 2 slot on the New York Times best-seller list.

“It was a surprise success that continues to fascinate and engage readers,” Koupal says. “Pioneer Girl: The Annotated Autobiography is the first volume to explore in-depth the communities and people the Ingalls family knew and the life they lived on the frontier.”

The e-book can be purchased at sdhspress.com in both Epub and Mobi formats for $29.95. All State Historical Society eBooks, including Laura Ingalls Wilder: A Writer’s Life, also by Pamela Smith Hill, can be purchased online at sdhspress.com.

Enjoy!

Jennifer McIntyre

Pioneer Girl in Japan

Around the world, Laura Ingalls Wilder remains a popular and influential writer—even in places wildly different from the Ingalls family’s expansive frontier. That fact was made clear again this week when Nanase Tominaga, editor at Taishukan Publishing Company, contacted the Pioneer Girl Project with good news. Taishukan is the Tokyo publisher of the Japanese edition of Pioneer Girl: The Annotated Autobiography.読売新聞4月2日記事2

Tominaga informed us that their edition is going into a second printing after just six months. Yumiko Taniguchi, the book’s translator, also shared a newspaper article that prominently features the work she did on the project.

We are thrilled to hear that Japanese readers are enjoying Wilder’s original manuscript as much as those in the United States.

Jennifer McIntyre

C-SPAN Stops by the Pioneer Girl Project

Earlier this fall, C-SPAN correspondents stopped by the Pioneer Girl Project office to speak with Nancy Tystad Koupal during BookTV’s City Tour of Pierre, South Dakota. From discussion of Laura Ingalls Wilder herself to why Pioneer Girl: The Annotated Autobiography is such a big book, Koupal outlined the Project’s early beginnings, current research, and overall goals as it continues down the path of research into the life and legacy of Laura Ingalls Wilder.

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Below are a few excerpts from the program. You can watch the entire episode online at c-span.org.

“We decided to go with the handwritten original because that was the closest to Wilder’s original voice,” says Koupal. (However, as detailed in a previous post, once that decision was made, the work did not end there.)

“I was in New York and my staff called me and said, “We’re on the New York Times Best Seller list!” We were pretty excited. . . . It opened up a whole new world of conversations.”

“One of the things that the Annotated Autobiography did was it allowed us to think more comprehensively about what the Pioneer Girl Project was doing. And what we decided we wanted to do was really look at those [other Pioneer Girl] texts and start to answer some of those questions . . . what kind of an editor was Rose Wilder Lane? What kind of a memory did Laura Ingalls Wilder have? To what extent was that memory supplemented by her daughter’s work? And this is just on the nonfiction aspects of it. . . . Then you move into fiction, and how did that daughter/editor/agent lead her mother into fiction, and what were the roles of the two women?”

“We don’t understand, as a reading public, . . . the role of authors and editors—that most good authors have good editors. . . . We don’t talk to enough editors, we don’t know what it is that they really do, and I think we should rectify that.”

Two other South Dakota Historical Society Press authors were interviewed during the Pierre City Tour, Cathie Draine, author of Cowboy Life: The Letters of George Phillip, and Nathan Sanderson, author of Controlled Recklessness: Ed Lemmon and the Open Range. Find more information about both books at sdhspress.com.

 

An Ocean of Green and Yellow Surrounds Me

“Almost at once we drove through the breaks along the river; crossed the Sioux river and were out on the broad prairie that looked like a big meadow as far as we could see in every direction” (Wilder, Pioneer Girl, p. 153).

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Photographs by Jacob Jurss

I do not have a covered wagon. My horse is made of aluminum, carbon fiber, and rubber. It is fueled by coffee, not hay, and rolls instead of gallops. When I’m not researching and writing, I cycle on the backroads west of our offices in Pierre, South Dakota. I clear my head and quietly enjoy the beauty that surrounds me. Peddling my bicycle, I climb up out of the Missouri River valley and turn out onto the wind-swept flats that seem to stretch out forever. Blue skies with the occasional white cloud float lazily overhead. The sun burns the paved road, but there is nearly always a stiff headwind to help cool me down.

Perhaps the most common comparison of the wind in the prairie grasses is the comparison to waves rolling on the ocean. Watching the wind play with the grasses, I consider it an apt description. The road I travel down is far smoother than earlier roads, and livestock fences are more prevalent, but there are still long stretches of uninterrupted grasslands that stretch for miles. I think about the region’s people—the Arikaras and Lakotas, French traders, Norwegian and other immigrants and settlers—watching the same grasslands racing the sky to the horizon. I am reminded that for many readers of Wilder’s collected works it is the descriptions of place, the idea of home, that causes them to read and read again. Wilder’s vivid depictions never fail to create detailed images in my mind, but sometimes it’s important to place oneself physically in a place. I smell the air; I listen to the breeze. I race along backroads and quietly enjoy the vastness of the South Dakota sky.

Jacob Jurss

Past and Future Projects

In 2010, the South Dakota Historical Society Press set up the Pioneer Girl Project as a research and publishing program to create a comprehensive edition of Wilder’s autobiography, as well as to create books dedicated to exploring Wilder’s life and works. We had just earned the privilege of publishing Wilder’s memoir from the Little House Heritage Trust, and we were determined to do a thorough and professional job of it. We modeled the project loosely on the Mark Twain Project at the Bancroft Library/University of California Press, which was then publishing Twain’s multi-volume autobiography. Since 2010, we have had a dedicated team working in period newspapers, census and land records, archival collections in five or more states, and other primary and secondary materials to research the life and times of the original pioneer girl and her manuscripts. In 2012, we began this website as a way to share our research with those who were interested in Wilder’s life and legacy.

PG cover 72dpi 220pxThe first phase of our project came to fruition in 2014, with the publication of Pioneer Girl: The Annotated Autobiography, edited by Pamela Smith Hill. And, as you all know, that book found both a national and international audience and went on to become another bestselling volume by author Laura Ingalls Wilder. Moreover, its financial success gave the Pioneer Girl Project team the resources to plan three additional books. The second is Pioneer Girl Perspectives: Exploring Laura Ingalls Wilder, published in May 2017.

The idea for the additional books began as the research for and editing of Wilder’s 9781941813089original handwritten autobiography was drawing to a close in 2014.  The project team could see that many questions remained unanswered about Wilder as a person and about Wilder as a writer—and especially about the relationship between Wilder and her daughter Rose Wilder Lane. Because we had been studying the text of the handwritten Pioneer Girl so meticulously and comparing it to the typed and edited versions, it became clear that there was indeed something special about that mother/daughter, writer/editor relationship. This complex relationship reveals itself more fully as we examine Lane’s edits to her mother’s writing and then evaluate the evolution in Wilder’s response. Clues about this process abound in both the nonfiction and fiction texts, drafts, discarded pages, and other materials held at the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library and elsewhere.

In the upcoming books, we plan to address nonfiction and fiction processes separately. Pioneer Girl: The Revised Texts will concentrate on Wilder’s and Lane’s interaction in the creation of the nonfiction autobiography. The book will contain the text of the three surviving typescript versions of Wilder’s autobiography in a side-by-side format. This presentation will facilitate intertextual comparison among the Brandt, Brandt Revised, and Bye manuscripts. The book will also contain annotations that highlight differences among the manuscripts and provide an analysis of Wilder’s and Lane’s working relationship as revealed in those manuscripts and elsewhere. The annotations will not repeat material published in the first volume, offering instead new information about Wilder’s life and its historical context where relevant. The Revised Texts will focus on the editorial work that Rose Wilder Lane performed on these adult, nonfiction manuscripts and the revisions or additions that Wilder herself made to them.

By contrast, the fourth book will analyze Wilder’s transition from nonfiction to fiction writer. In Pioneer Girl: The Path into Fiction, we will take a closer look at Lane’s role as her mother’s editor and agent in the field of children’s literature and at Wilder’s initial attempts at writing fiction. While the overarching purpose of both books will be to study the relationship between Wilder and Lane, the fourth book will examine the fiction writing/editorial process itself, a process in which both women took active roles. Other books have discussed this process, but The Path into Fiction will be the first to explore it completely within the context of the most critical piece of evidence—the draft manuscripts themselves.

We are excited about these forthcoming books, and we think that the study of the texts themselves will tell us much about the creative and editorial processes as well as about Wilder and Lane as working writers.

Nancy Tystad Koupal

The Bottom of the Ninth

The presses never seem to rest for Pioneer Girl: The Annotated Autobiography. The ninth printing of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s book recently arrived at the South Dakota Historical Society Press warehouse, bringing the total number of copies in print to over 165,000. Our good friends to the north at Friesens Corp. sent us photographs of the bestseller on their production lines. It’s like our very own episode of How It’s Made!

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One Year! The Pioneer Girl Project Celebrates the First Anniversary since the release of “Pioneer Girl: The Annotated Autobiography”

It is hard to believe that one year has passed since the Pioneer Girl Project first unloaded pallets upon pallets and boxes upon boxes of books—readying them to be sent out all over the world. And what a year it has been!

Places like The Bookstore at Fitger's, in Duluth, MN, put Pioneer Girl: The Annotated Autobiography front and center in their stores.

Places like The Bookstore at Fitger’s, in Duluth, MN, put Pioneer Girl: The Annotated Autobiography front and center in their stores.

“The past twelve months have been a wild ride,” says Nancy Tystad Koupal, director of the Pioneer Girl Project. “We are ecstatic; the success of the book has been beyond our wildest dreams.”

On November 17, 2014, the South Dakota Historical Society Press released Pioneer Girl: The Annotated Autobiography. And, as readers of this site know, the first three printings quickly sold out as the title became the “it book” of the 2014 holiday season. As more copies rolled off the presses, Pioneer Girl: The Annotated Autobiography jumped up to number one on Amazon.com and spent six weeks on the New York Times Best Sellers list, an amazing accomplishment for what various media networks have dubbed “a small press on the prairie.”

To date, Pioneer Girl: The Annotated Autobiography has sold over 145,000 copies and been featured in the Wall Street Journal and on National Public Radio. It has over 2,635 ratings and 600 reviews on Goodreads and has been held up as the best way to publish a famous author’s first draft—see the Willamette Week’s review of Go Set a Watchman and numerous conversations on Reddit/r/books. It is the stuff of publishing legends. And it does not end there.

PW Mitzis Tweet

Mitzi’s Books, an independent bookstore in Rapid City, SD, gave a shout out to the Press over Twitter when they received their issue of Publishers Weekly.

The November 2, 2015, issue of Publishers Weekly featured Pioneer Girl: The Annotated Autobiography on the cover. And the November 23, 2015, issue will feature a story about the book and Press.

What a great year it has been!

—Jennifer McIntyre

A Review of “Pioneer Girl” from the “Missouri Historical Review”

Missouri Historical Review edited, with photos

The review above can be found in the October 2015 Missouri Historical Review. The photographs were added by Pioneer Girl Project staff for the Project website.

For more reviews of Pioneer Girl: The Annotated Autobiographyclick here to visit the Pioneer Girl Project Review page.