Historical society press can't keep up with demand for Pioneer Girl

Editors rejected Laura Ingalls Wilder’s autobiography when she wrote it in 1930. Little did they know the work would become a best-seller when first published almost 85 years later.

In November 2014, the South Dakota State Historical Society Press released Pioneer Girl: The Annotated Autobiography, written by Wilder and edited by Pamela Smith Hill. The first printing of 15,000 copies sold out before Christmas and the next 15,000 sold out “before it even came off the press,” according to Nancy Tystad Koupal, director and editor-in-chief of the South Dakota Historical Society Press and the Pioneer Girl Project.

Pioneer Girl made The New York Times best-seller list this spring and a fifth printing in May will put more than 125,000 copies in print, Koupal said.

Such numbers are unprecedented for the South Dakota press, founded in 1997.

“When we first envisioned this project back in 2009, we projected that we would print 5,000 copies, which is a good-sized run for us,” Koupal said. But the public is much more interested in obtaining copies than the project’s editors imagined.

“It’s just not the kind of book we anticipated would be a best-seller,” Koupal said. “It’s encyclopedic.”

Currently available in hardback only, Pioneer Girl is 472 pages and includes images, annotations, and maps, in addition to Wilder’s original manuscript. But Koupal said she thinks its encyclopedic quality is part of what makes it appealing to audiences who have loved Wilder’s Little House series: “So much of the back story is there.”

Koupal also said the autobiography dispels any misconception the Little House books are completely true: “They’re based on history, but they’re fiction.”

For example, Hill said in an interview with PBS Newshour, Wilder wrote about her younger brother’s birth and death in Pioneer Girl, though his short, nine months of life is left out of the Little House series. “[S]he also talks about a period in her family’s life where the Ingalls family didn’t moved west, as they always do in the novel,” Hill told PBS. “Instead, they moved east.”

Hill also wrote a blog post about Wilder’s autobiographical depiction of her father, comparing it to the beloved Pa of the Little House series. “[B]ased on the historical record and Wilder’s recollections, it is clear that the fictional character in her novels is romanticized and idealized,” Hill wrote on The Pioneer Girl Project blog. “In Pioneer Girl, for example, Pa sneaked his family out of town in the middle of the night after failing to negotiate the rent with the landlord.” But according to Hill, “the essence” of Pa’s character is true to Wilder’s father in Pioneer Girl, despite being idealized in the fictional works.

“Wilder pulls off the difficult trick of telling a rich, satisfying story about good people being good,” wrote Ruth Graham in a Slate review of Pioneer Girl. “The Pa of Pioneer Girl is still a selfless provider, Ma is a skilled homemaker, Mary a prim playmate, and Laura a good-hearted tomboy.”

The South Dakota Historical Society Press plans to convert Pioneer Girl into an e-book, though Koupal said the maps, appendices, photos, and multiple columns make it “not your standard Kindle-friendly book.”

The manuscript for Wilder’s autobiography is in a vault in Missouri, but thousands of readers now have access to the account. Though people might say Wilder and her works are declining in popularity, Koupal points to the success of her annotated autobiography to show that’s far from true.