Wilder memoir to give gritty view of prairie life

Yahoo News ^ | 8-16-14 | Kevin Burbach

[afraidfortherepublic]

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.

"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 off whiskey.

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 publishers 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.

~snip~

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.

[yarddog]

This is what remains of the Wilder home in Northern Holmes County, FL. No one seems to know they spent a year in Florida and their Cousin's family still lives here right beside their old home.

[KosmicKitty]

Read all her books, many times. Now I read them to my granddaughters.

Can’t wait for this one to be published.

[bgill]

During an elementary age field trip to a meat market, ‘lil miss b blew up an intestine and made a balloon animal.

[miss marmelstein]

Read them all, too. Life on the prairie certainly wasn’t all fun and games. The books are pretty realistic and sometimes downright terrifying. And non-pc, too. Ma wasn’t exactly a fan of the Indians.

[bigbob]

for cryin out loud - where this family NOT live? Wisconsin, Iowa, Minnesota, Missouri, - and Florida too? Talk about mobility..if you travel the backroads of the midwest you’ll get dizzy trying to keep all the Wilder Shrines straight.

[Georgia Girl 2]

So true. My grandfather was a cowboy out in the Dakotas in the early 1900’s and he sent for my grandmother from Indianapolis IN. She went out on the train and they got married the day she arrived. She had waited for him for 7 years.

My grandfather had gotten a homestead and they had a sod hut (soddy) which I have seen a pic of. Its just like you see on the TV movies. My grandmother who was a tough Irish woman lasted one year. It was so bad she made my grandfather pack it up, sell out and they moved to Joplin MO where my dad was born. That was the end of that.

[cyclotic]

I have a first edition copy somewhere around the house. I read them all several times while growing up...an I’m a guy

[miss marmelstein]

They’re marketed to little girls, which is a mistake. They can be brutal some of the books.

[Graybeard58]

if you travel the backroads of the midwest you’ll get dizzy trying to keep all the Wilder Shrines straight.

As many as Jessie James' hideouts?

[MD Expat in PA]

The Little House On The Prairie book series were good but except for perhaps the 1st year of the TV show, the TV show was horrible. I was nice family friendly entertainment perhaps, but not at all historically accurate and not even true to the books – the TV show took a lot of liberties from the original material and story. And it became way too preachy and way too sappy and sentimental and way too PC in the later seasons for my tastes.

Personally I would love to see a remake of the series, perhaps as a multi-part mini-series on something like the History Channel like they did with the Hatfields and McCoys and the Vikings series. It could be very well done if it depicted the true hardships of those settlers and did it in a non-biased and non-PC way and in an historically accurate way, perhaps incorporating the The Annotated Autobiography .