{"id":247,"date":"2012-06-03T00:31:44","date_gmt":"2012-06-03T00:31:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thelittlehousearchive.wordpress.com\/?p=247"},"modified":"2020-12-19T22:34:03","modified_gmt":"2020-12-19T22:34:03","slug":"publication-of-laura-ingalls-wilders-pioneer-girl","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/benjaminlefebvre.com\/littlehouse\/2012\/06\/03\/publication-of-laura-ingalls-wilders-pioneer-girl\/","title":{"rendered":"Publication of Laura Ingalls Wilder\u2019s Pioneer Girl"},"content":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s been announced recently that the South Dakota State Historical Society Press<\/a> is preparing an annotated edition of Laura Ingalls Wilder\u2019s memoir \u201cPioneer Girl,\u201d with plans to publish the book in June 2013. It\u2019s being prepared by Pamela Smith Hill, author of the exceptional biography Laura Ingalls Wilder: A Writer\u2019s Life<\/em><\/a>, which I found filled with wonderful new insights and information about Wilder, her families, and her communities.<\/p>\n

I started reading Wilder\u2019s books as a boy, around the same time that I watched reruns of the TV show Little House on the Prairie<\/em> on the nearest CBS affiliate. Unlike a number of readers of Wilder\u2019s texts who detested the TV show due to the huge liberties taken with the story, I found both Little House worlds equally interesting, in spite of the differences in terms of medium and storytelling style (also, alas, the books did not have extreme close-ups of Pa crying). Moreover, I\u2019ve continued to be interested in both adapted texts and adaptations as an adult. The TV show Little House on the Prairie<\/em> remains a guilty pleasure, and I confess to enjoying the wide range of parodies and mash-ups I\u2019ve seen on YouTube. My research in the field of Ingalls-Wilder-Lane studies hasn\u2019t been extensive, except for a few review articles and a website that doesn\u2019t get a lot of traffic, but this fall I\u2019ll be publishing a chapter entitled \u201cOur Home on Native Land: Adapting and Readapting Laura Ingalls Wilder\u2019s Little House on the Prairie<\/em>\u201d in my latest collection of essays, Textual Transformations in Children\u2019s Literature<\/em><\/a>. (I went over the copy-edited version not too long ago and am currently waiting for proofs. The book should be out in August or September.)<\/p>\n

This week I started rereading Wilder\u2019s novel Farmer Boy<\/em> (the one about Almanzo), partly because I haven\u2019t reread it in ages and partly because I\u2019m trying to make sense of a recent sequel entitled Farmer Boy Goes West<\/em>. I\u2019ve also had a blast reading recent memoirs by Melissa Gilbert, Alison Arngrim, and Melissa Anderson, three of the actors from the TV show. I always enjoy knowing more about the people behind texts or shows that I like\u2014even (or especially) aspects that reveal them to be real human beings.<\/p>\n

Anyway, I\u2019m glad Pioneer Girl<\/em> will finally be available in book form. I read parts of one draft on microfilm, and it was enough to convince me that it\u2019s a significantly different story than the one told in Wilder\u2019s autofiction. These differences are important, especially because of the misconception that Wilder\u2019s books are straightforward autobiography or memoir. They are, in a sense, but without insisting on total historical accuracy. In the final analysis, they are not history<\/em>, but story<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Wilder\u2019s literary and cultural legacy shows no signs of slowing down. Her books are about to be reissued in the Library of America, in two paperback volumes and in a boxed set of hardcovers, both of which are definitely on my to-buy list. Her (largely negative) depiction of Native Americans is complex and complicated (at least to an extent), and it needs to be discussed more, especially since the novel Little House on the Prairie<\/em> is still being bought for children. And while there have been numerous attempts to keep the story going by devising all kinds of prequels, sequels, interquels, sidequels, abridgments, and activity books, none of these offshoots\u2014except for the TV show Little House on the Prairie<\/em>\u2014has endured. It\u2019s Wilder\u2019s own story that continues to be read, reread, and discussed as a particular slice of U.S. colonial history and children\u2019s literature. And so having access to Wilder\u2019s original first-person memoir, which she transformed into a set of children\u2019s books after being unable to sell it, will add tremendously to our understanding of how this purportedly \u201ctrue\u201d story came to be shaped and reshaped.<\/p>\n

A website for the Pioneer Girl Project<\/a> has also been launched, and I for one look forward to seeing more details about this book as they become available.<\/p>\n

UPDATE<\/strong>: Speaking of Laura Ingalls Wilder, my friend Melanie Fishbane<\/a> has just published a guest blog entry<\/a> on the excellent website Beyond Little House<\/em>, which is the go-to place for everything Wilder-related. She discusses the chapter \u201cAlmanzo Says Good-By\u201d from These Happy Golden Years<\/em> and even throws in the weird-but-fascinating TV movie Beyond the Prairie: The True Story of Laura Ingalls Wilder<\/em>, where the keyword \u201ctrue\u201d definitely belongs in quotation marks (but it\u2019s fascinating nonetheless).<\/p>\n

UPDATE 2<\/strong>: I guess I should mention that Mel and I actually drove to Dearborn, Michigan in November 2010 to see a Laura Ingalls Wilder exhibit there. You can read more about it in Mel\u2019s blog post, where I\u2019m the unidentified \u201cfriend.\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s been announced recently that the South Dakota State Historical Society Press is preparing an annotated edition of Laura Ingalls Wilder\u2019s memoir \u201cPioneer Girl,\u201d with…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[9,18,19,21,24],"class_list":["post-247","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book","tag-alison-arngrim","tag-melanie-fishbane","tag-melissa-anderson","tag-melissa-gilbert","tag-pamela-smith-hill"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/benjaminlefebvre.com\/littlehouse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/247","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/benjaminlefebvre.com\/littlehouse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/benjaminlefebvre.com\/littlehouse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/benjaminlefebvre.com\/littlehouse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/benjaminlefebvre.com\/littlehouse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=247"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/benjaminlefebvre.com\/littlehouse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/247\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":599,"href":"https:\/\/benjaminlefebvre.com\/littlehouse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/247\/revisions\/599"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/benjaminlefebvre.com\/littlehouse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=247"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/benjaminlefebvre.com\/littlehouse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=247"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/benjaminlefebvre.com\/littlehouse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=247"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}