Pioneer Girl: The Revised Texts edited by Nancy Tystad Koupal 

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. 

Hardcover

484 pages

ISBN: 1941813097

About the authors: Laura Ingalls Wilder finished her autobiography, Pioneer Girl, in 1930 when she was sixty-three years old. Throughout the 1930s and into the early 1940s, Wilder utilized her original manuscript to write a successful series of books for young readers. Her daughter, journalist Rose Wilder Lane, served as her editor and agent and borrowed from her mother's life story to write two novels of her own. Wilder died in Mansfield, Missouri, at ninety years of age. Nancy Tystad Koupal is director and the South Dakota Historical Society Press. She received an M.A. in English from Morehead State University of Wisconsin, Madison. She founded the South Dakota Historical Society Press in 1997, Koupal is also the editor and annotator of Our Landlady, a collection of L. Frank Baum's satirical newspaper columns. 

Image description: The book cover shows a watercolor-style illustration of three girls with braided hair and wearing long dresses walking hand-in-hand through a colorful field. One of the girls is carrying a basket with flowers, and one girl is running ahead of them towards one of the two buildings in the distance. The title, subtitle, author’s name, and editor’s name are displayed at the top of the cover image.