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WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 20. 2014
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THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
Annotated 'Pioneer Girl' to print
ASSOCIATED PRESS
ASSOCIATED PRESS
PIERRE, S.D. — Laura Ingalls Wilder penned one of the most beloved children's series of the 20th century, but her forthcoming autobiography will show devoted "Little House on the Prairie" fans a more realistic, grittier view of frontier living.
The South Dakota State Historical Society Press plans to publish "Pioneer Girl: The Annotated Autobiography," the autobiography of Laura Ingalls Wilder, with a cover illustrated by Judy Thompson.
"Pioneer Girl: The Annotated Autobiography" — Wilder's unedited draft that was written for an adult audience and eventually served as the foundation for the popular series — is slated to be released by the South Dakota State Historical Society Press nationwide this fall. The not-safe-for-children tales include stark scenes of domestic abuse, love triangles gone awry and a man who lit himself on fire while drunk.
Wilder and her daughter Rose Wilder Lane, herself a well-known author, tried and failed to get an edited version of the autobiography published throughout the early 1930s. The original rough draft has been preserved at the Laura Ingalls Wilder Historic Home and Museum in Mansfield, Missouri, for decades but hadn't been published.
The children's series never presented a romanticized version of life on the prairie — in "Little House in the Big Woods," Laura and her sister Mary gleefully help dissect the family pig before bouncing its inflated bladder back and forth in the yard. But the series also left out or fictionalized scenes that Wilder deemed unsuitable for kids, including much of the time the family spent in
Burr Oak, Iowa, and Walnut Grove, Minnesota, according to Pamela Smith Hill, a Wilder biographer and the lead editor on the autobiography.
"So you can read 'Pioneer Girl' as nonfiction rather than fiction and get a better feeling of how the historical Ingalls family really lived, what their relationships were and how they experienced the American West," she said.
Wilder details a scene from her childhood in Burr Oak, in which a neighbor of the Ingalls' pours kerosene throughout his bedroom, sets it on fire and proceeds to drunkenly drag his wife around by her hair before Wilder's father Pa in the children's books intervenes.
Scenes like that make Wilder's memoir sound like it's filled with scandal and mature themes, "which isn't exactly true either," according to Amy Lauters, an associate professor of mass media at Minnesota State University-Mankato.
"It's just that that first version was blunt, it was honest. It was full of the everyday sorts of things that we don't care to think about when we think about history," said Lauters, who has read the original manuscript and also is writing a book on Rose Wilder Lane. "And it's certainly not the fantasized version we saw on 'Little House on the Prairie' the television show."
Wilder's story will likely do well in South Dakota, since the author moved to De Smet in the late 1870s with her family, eventually meeting her future husband there.
For fans, the autobiography is chance to see from where Wilder drew her inspiration, said Sandra Hume, a Wilder aficionado who published an internationally distributed newsletter for 10 years and now helps manage Laurapalooza, a conference dedicated to all things Wilder.
"I am very excited to see people have access to this, because her life story has been pretty muddled because people get mixed up with the TV show and it's nice to see an interest in people seeing basically what is the primary source ..." she said.
The autobiography preserves
Wilder's original rough draft
— misspellings, idiosyncrasies
and all — but adds extensive
annotations.
"Little House" lovers can learn about the three girls that Wilder combined to create the Nellie Olson character, or how extensive the damage was in Minnesota during the grasshopper plague of the 1870s, which forced Pa in "On the Banks of Plum Creek" to set out in search of work.
"In some ways, I came to think of the annotations in 'Pioneer Girl' as almost an encyclopedia about Laura Ingalls Wilder's life and work," Hill said.
JOB FROM PAGE 1
anything else that the players needed, as well as helped fans and patrons with anything else they needed around the grounds. It gave me the experience that I loved and enjoyed, and also showed me the type of work, the amount of work that needs to be done to put on a professional level event. I play tennis recreationally... and it's a passion of mine that I would love to work in someday."
Samantha Spillers, sophomore, civil engineering major: Tech Intern at Utility Design Services in Edwardsville, Ill.
"Utility Design Services (UDS) is a small engineering company that is affiliated with Donco Electric. I worked on the National Electric Safety Code (NESC) Project. Our company contracted with Ameren Illinois, a major electricity provider in Illinois, to complete this project. My job required me to travel to towns all over the state of Illinois to do safety inspections on the electric services on houses and, occasionally, businesses. When I did these inspections, I looked for safety violations such as building contact (the service wire, or power line, was touching the house somehow) or a clearance issue (the line was too low over the yard, driveway, street, pool, etc.). Once I identified the problem, I filled out a report that included measurements and pictures of the violation and then came up with a solution for how the problem could be fixed on the spot. The recommendations I made then went into a letter that was sent to the customer to notify them that the electric service on their home had a violation... I was able to learn a lot about an unfamiliar field. This internship taught me more about what an engineer's job entitles, and assured me that engineering is the right career for me."
Sarah Taylor, senior, mechanical engineering major: Engineering Services Intern at Epcot in Orlando, Fla.
"I helped develop solutions for ride maintenance issues in a couple on the Future World and World Showcase attractions. I feel that I was able to apply the technical skills learned at KU to a much broader concept. I learned a lot about communication, and how a large company functions. Being able to see a project from the initial problem all the way until my designs were implemented was something invaluable. I hope to return to Disney after graduating in May, so completing my second internship with them makes me a more competitive applicant."
Edited by Kate Miller
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