Hi there,
I was wondering whether you would be able to help me. I have been looking around for a biography about Laura Ingalls Wilder, but there seem to be so many. I was wondering if you would be able to recommend one (or two) that I should definitely read?
Also, I have read here and there that Laura wrote an autobiography that was rejected by publishers. Do you know if there are any plans to publish this now, as this is something I would dearly love to read?
Many thanks for your help.
Kind regards,
Estelle
Dear Estelle,
Many biographical accounts of Laura’s life have been written, from booklet to book form. Gift shops atLaura’s homesites sell various William Anderson-penned booklets relating to different aspects of Laura’s life, among them “The Story of the Ingalls” and “Laura Wilder of Mansfield.”
The first book-length biography was Donald Zochert’s Laura: The Life of Laura Ingalls Wilder, published in the early 1970s. It contains a lot of previously unknown details about her life behind what she revealed in the Little House series and is heavily based on the “Pioneer Girl” manuscript.
Becoming Laura Ingalls Wilder: The Woman Behind the Legend, by John Miller (who will be speaking at 2010’s LauraPalooza), investigates Laura’s emergence as a writer in Mansfield, Missouri, where she lived from age 27 until her death.
Laura Ingalls Wilder: A Writer’s Life by Pamela Smith Hill (also a keynote speaker at this year’s LauraPalooza) is the most recent biography published about Laura. It takes a literary standpoint, exploring the writer-editor relationship between Laura and her journalist daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, as Laura began to make a name for herself in children’s fiction.
Although somewhat dense and academic, William Holtz’s The Ghost in the Little House, a biography of Rose, is exhaustively researched and contains quite a bit of information about Laura that hadn’t been previously published.
“Pioneer Girl” is the unpublished manuscript you’ve heard about that was rejected by publishers (though at one point The Saturday Evening Post considered publishing it in serial form). A version of it is available for research and study purposes at the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library and Museum in West Branch, Iowa. You can go to the Hoover’s research center yourself to read it (and reams of other Wilder/Lane documents housed there) or you can contact them and they can copy it and mail it to you. This is not cheap: the copy fees alone will run you over a hundred dollars.
Given the expense, you may want to wait. We’ve recently learned of definite plans for an official publication of “Pioneer Girl” at last. We’ll keep you posted as we learn more
As for which published biography is better than the others, I think it’s best to leave it to the readers.
LIW fans, let’s help Estelle out. What’s your opinion on Laura’s biographies? When you really feel like sitting down and reading about Laura, which one do you pick up? Make sure to tell us why.