For generations, the works of Laura Ingalls Wilder have defined the American frontier and the pioneer experience for the public at large. Pioneer Girl: The Revised Texts presents three typescripts of Wilder's original Pioneer Girl manuscript in an examination of the process through which she and her daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, transformed her autobiography into the much-loved Little House series. As the women polished the narrative from draft to draft, a picture emerges of the working relationship between the women, of the lives they lived, and of the literary works they created. Editor Nancy Tystad Koupal and other editors of the Pioneer Girl Project provide a meticulous study of the Wilder/Lane partnership as Wilder's autobiography undergoes revision, and the women redevelop and expand portions of it into Wilder's successful children's and young adult novels and into Lane's bestselling adult novels in the 1930s. The three revised texts of Pioneer Girl, set side by side, showcase the intertwined processes of writing and editing and the contributions of writer and editor. In background essays and annotations, Koupal and her team of editors provide historical context and explore the ways in which Wilder or Lane changed and reused the material. Wilder and Lane's partnership has been the subject of longstanding speculation, but Pioneer Girl: The Revised Texts is the first work to explore the women's relationship by examining the evolution of surviving manuscripts. Showcasing differences in the texts and offering numerous additional documents and handwritten emendations, the editors create a rich resource for scholars to use in assessing the editorial and writing principles, choices, and reasoning that Lane employed to shape the manuscripts for publication. Readers can follow along as Wilder grows into a novelist that "no depression could stop." The New York Times best seller, Pioneer Girl: The Annotated Autobiography (2014), edited by Pamela Smith Hill, gave the general reader easy access to Wilder's original account for the first time, but that book only scratched the surface of available textual and archival materials. Ultimately, the editors of Pioneer Girl: The Revised Texts employ the rich resource of letters between Wilder and her publisher and between Wilder and Lane, along with rough drafts and false starts of the Little House books, to inform scholars and readers about the original manuscript's metamorphosis into novels and about the intriguing editorial relationship between Wilder and Lane. Pioneer Girl: The Revised Texts deepens our understanding of Laura Ingalls Wilder and the process through which she would ultimately become an icon of young adult literature.

Laura Ingalls Wilder (1867?1957) finished her autobiography, Pioneer Girl, in 1930 when she was sixty-three years old. Throughout the 1930s and into the early 1940s, she drew upon her original manuscript to write a successful series of books for young readers. Wilder's vision of life on the American frontier in the last half of the nineteenth century continues to draw new generations of readers to her Little House books. Editor Nancy Tystad Koupal has collected essays from noted scholars of Wilder's life and work that explore the themes and genesis of Wilder's writings. Pioneer Girl Perspectives sheds new light on the story behind Wilder's original manuscript and examines the ways in which the author and her daughter and editor, Rose Wilder Lane, worked to develop a marketable narrative. The essay contributors delve into the myths and realities of Wilder's work to discover the real lives of frontier children, the influence of time and place on both Wilder and Lane, and the role of folklore in the Little House novels. Together, the essays give readers a deeper understanding of how Wilder built and managed her story. Published over eighty years after its inception, Pioneer Girl: The Annotated Autobiography edited by Pamela Smith Hill gave readers new insight into the truth behind Wilder's fiction. Pioneer Girl Perspectives further demonstrates the importance of Wilder as an influential American author whose stories of growing up on the frontier remain relevant today.

'It is widely known that L. Frank Baum spent several years in South Dakota before moving to Chicago, where he wrote the Oz books that made him famous...Koupal carefully lays out the complexities and ambiguities of Baum's thinking by providing us with the full texts of Baum's columns published weekly in the "Aberdeen Saturday Pioneer" between January 1890 and February 1891, and by adding her own commentary and a glossary to place these writings in context. Entitled "Our Landlady", the column described in a generally humorous vein the conversations and activities of four fictional characters - the landlady and three of her regular boarders - and a wide variety of prominent local residents of Aberdeen' - "Great Plains Quarterly". 'Readers will be grateful to Koupal for this amusing and edifying supplement to our understanding of one of the giants of American popular culture' - "Western Historical Quarterly".'Baum's humor is of the biting kind...readers of "Our Landlady" will find the beginnings of Baum's wonderful world of humor as well as an informative look at life in a prairie state' - "South Dakota History". 'Koupal is an admirable editor. It's hard to see how the work could be improved' - "The Baum Bugle". Nancy Tystad Koupal is a native of Mitchell, South Dakota, and serves as director of the Research and Publishing Program at the South Dakota State Historical Society.