Click here to order Pioneer Girl Project books (for individuals in the U.S.)
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The Pioneer Girl Project has been hard at work on its next book, which will be available October 15, 2021!

Pioneer Girl: The Revised Texts

By Laura Ingalls Wilder
Edited by Nancy Tystad Koupal

$49.95

Hardcover, 9 x 10 inches
Black-and-white illustrations, annotations, bibliography, index
ISBN 978-1-941813-09-6

For generations, the works of Laura Ingalls Wilder have defined the American frontier and the pioneer experience for the public at large. Pioneer Girl: The Revised Texts presents three typescripts of Wilder’s original Pioneer Girl manuscript in an examination of the process through which she and her daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, transformed her autobiography into the much-loved Little House series. As the women polished the narrative from draft to draft, a picture emerges of the working relationship between the women, of the lives they lived, and of the literary works they created.

Editor Nancy Tystad Koupal and other editors of the Pioneer Girl Project provide a meticulous study of the Wilder/Lane partnership as Wilder’s autobiography undergoes revision, and the women redevelop and expand portions of it into Wilder’s successful children’s and young adult novels and into Lane’s bestselling adult novels in the 1930s. The three revised texts of Pioneer Girl, set side by side, showcase the intertwined processes of writing and editing and the contributions of writer and editor. In background essays and annotations, Koupal and her team of editors provide historical context and explore the ways in which Wilder or Lane changed and reused the material.

Wilder and Lane’s partnership has been the subject of longstanding speculation, but Pioneer Girl: The Revised Texts is the first work to explore the women’s relationship by examining the evolution of surviving manuscripts. Showcasing differences in the texts and offering numerous additional documents and handwritten emendations, the editors create a rich resource for scholars to use in assessing the editorial and writing principles, choices, and reasoning that Lane employed to shape the manuscripts for publication. Readers can follow along as Wilder grows into a novelist that “no depression could stop.”

The New York Times best seller, Pioneer Girl: The Annotated Autobiography (2014), edited by Pamela Smith Hill, gave the general reader easy access to Wilder’s original account for the first time, but that book only scratched the surface of available textual and archival materials. Ultimately, the editors of Pioneer Girl: The Revised Texts employ the rich resource of letters between Wilder and her publisher and between Wilder and Lane, along with rough drafts and false starts of the Little House books, to inform scholars and readers about the original manuscript’s metamorphosis into novels and about the intriguing editorial relationship between Wilder and Lane. Pioneer Girl: The Revised Texts deepens our understanding of Laura Ingalls Wilder and the process through which she would ultimately become an icon of young adult literature.

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Earlier, the Pioneer Girl Project announced that Pioneer Girl Perspectives: Exploring Laura Ingalls Wilder would be coming out in 2017, and it did!

Pioneer Girl Perspectives: Exploring Laura Ingalls Wilder

Edited by Nancy Tystad Koupal

$29.95

Hardcover, 6.5 x 10 inches
Black-and-white illustrations, index, footnotes
ISBN 978-1-941813-08-9

Laura Ingalls Wilder (1867‒1957) finished her autobiography, Pioneer Girl, in 1930 when she was sixty-three years old. Throughout the 1930s and into the early 1940s, she drew upon her original manuscript to write a successful series of books for young readers. Wilder’s vision of life on the American frontier in the last half of the nineteenth century continues to draw new generations of readers to her Little House books.

Editor Nancy Tystad Koupal has collected essays from noted scholars of Wilder’s life and work that explore the themes and genesis of Wilder’s writings. Pioneer Girl Perspectives sheds new light on the story behind Wilder’s original manuscript and examines the ways in which the author and her daughter and editor, Rose Wilder Lane, worked to develop a marketable narrative. The essay contributors delve into the myths and realities of Wilder’s work to discover the real lives of frontier children, the influence of time and place on both Wilder and Lane, and the role of folklore in the Little House novels. Together, the essays give readers a deeper understanding of how Wilder built and managed her story.

Published over eighty years after its inception, Pioneer Girl: The Annotated Autobiography edited by Pamela Smith Hill gave readers new insight into the truth behind Wilder’s fiction. Pioneer Girl Perspectives further demonstrates the importance of Wilder as an influential American author whose stories of growing up on the frontier remain relevant today.

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On November 17, 2014, the South Dakota Historical Society Press began shipping Pioneer Girl: The Annotated Autobiography. Since that time, enthusiastic reviews in places such as Foreword Reviews, the Christian Science Monitor, and the Los Angeles Times have helped to make the book highly in demand. We promise that Pioneer Girl will be in print as long as readers want to explore the legacy of Laura Ingalls Wilder. Our office hours are 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. CST, Monday through Friday where you can contact us by calling (605) 773-6009.

Thank you for supporting the mission of the South Dakota Historical Society Press and the Pioneer Girl Project.

Pioneer Girl: The Annotated Autobiography

By Laura Ingalls Wilder
Pamela Smith Hill, editor

$39.95

Hardcover, 472 pages, 9 x 10 inches
125 black-and-white images, 8 maps, appendices, index, bibliography
ISBN: 978-0-9845041-7-6

Follow the real Laura Ingalls and her family as they make their way west—and discover that truth is as remarkable as fiction.

Hidden away since 1930, Laura Ingalls Wilder’s original autobiography reveals the true stories of her pioneering life. Some of her experiences will be familiar; some will be a surprise. Pioneer Girl: The Annotated Autobiography re-introduces readers to the woman who defined the pioneer experience for millions of people around the world.

Wilder details the Ingalls family’s journey through Kansas, Missouri, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, back to Minnesota, and on to Dakota Territory— sixteen years of travels, unforgettable stories, and the everyday people who became immortal through her fiction. Using additional manuscripts, diaries, and letters, editor Pamela Smith Hill adds valuable context and explores Wilder’s growth as a writer.

Pioneer Girl: The Annotated Autobiography also explores the history of the frontier that the Ingalls family traversed and the culture and life of the communities Wilder lived in. The book features over one hundred images, eight fully researched maps, and hundreds of annotations based on census data and records, newspapers of the period, and other primary documents.

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If you are an individual in the United States interested in ordering Pioneer Girl: The Revised Texts, please visit the South Dakota Historical Society Press website or call (605) 773-6009. If you reside in Canada, please call (605) 773-6009 or email orders@sdhspress.com.

If you are a reader or retailer outside the United States or Canada, please contact info@eurospangroup.com.

If you are a retailer or distributor in the United States or Canada interested in selling Pioneer Girl Project books, please email orders@sdshspress.com.

Thank you!

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Order here (for individuals in the U.S.)