Little Town on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder

In 2014, after a four-year effort by an organization called the “Pioneer Girl Project,” Wilder’s original manuscript for Pioneer Girl was published by the South Dakota Historical Society Press. No publishers were interested, so Rose started helping her mother transform the book into something softer and more kid-friendly. Her memoir, Pioneer Girl, was generally geared toward adults and featured some surprisingly bleak stories-like the time Wilder's neighbors froze to death during a Minnesota blizzard. Wilder was in her sixties by the time she began putting her early life on paper. Laura Ingalls Wilder’s first book was rejected by publishers. Wilder compared it to a “fairyland.” During the visit, Wilder also took a tumble off a streetcar and spent some time in the hospital recovering from a head wound. (To Rose, Wilder was simply “ Mama Bess.”) The pair explored the Panama-Pacific International Exposition, a world’s fair that boasted opulent new architecture, exciting new technology, and many more flashy feats. In 1915, Wilder journeyed west to visit her daughter, who was working as a journalist in San Francisco. Laura Ingalls Wilder visited the 1915 World’s Fair in San Francisco.Īn aerial view of San Francisco during the world's fair. Her pieces covered a wide range of farm-related topics-with titles like “Economy in Egg Production” and “Shorter Hours for Farm Women”-as well as more abstract musings, like “What’s in a Word” and “Make Your Dreams Come True.” She also wrote two recurring columns later in her tenure: “The Farm Home” and “As a Farm Woman Thinks.” 3. Around 1911, when Wilder was in her forties, she started contributing articles to a farm journal called The Missouri Ruralist. In 1894, the Wilders moved to Rocky Ridge Farm outside Mansfield, Missouri. Laura Ingalls Wilder started her writing career as a columnist. The two married in 1885 and welcomed a daughter, Rose, the following year. They settled in Dakota Territory, where a teenaged Laura took up teaching and met Almanzo Wilder. Laura Ingalls Wilder moved a lot during her early life.īorn near Lake Pepin, Wisconsin, Laura Ingalls spent her childhood traveling around the Midwest with her family, with stops in Minnesota, Iowa, and Kansas, among other places.

Get to know the pioneering author behind the series with these eight fascinating facts. Readers were captivated by her tales of family life on the homestead, and Wilder capitalized on this success by penning an entire series of Little House books, which followed the protagonist to the prairies of modern-day South Dakota and beyond. Though not every detail was strictly autobiographical, Little House in the Big Woods was the true story of its author, Laura Ingalls Wilder, who was born on February 7, 1867, and died on February 10, 1957. In the middle of the Great Depression, young bookworms were introduced to a spirited girl growing up in woodsy Wisconsin during the 1870s.

Little Town on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder