Image Description One: Front cover of Pioneer Girl: The Path Into Fiction featuring two horses pulling a sleigh in a snowy forest as a child stands nearby.

Image Description Two: Back cover of Pioneer Girl: The Path Into Fiction with review text over a snowy woodland illustration.

Back Cover Text: “Pioneer Girl: The Path into Fiction brings literary history alive. In compelling fashion, editor Nancy Tystad Koupal weaves together a treasure trove of primary sources explaining how Laura Ingalls Wilder, Rose Wilder Lane, and the editors working with them bridged the gap from autobiographical memoir to the lyrical Little House in the Big Woods. The inclusion of successive drafts allows today’s readers to examine the process of creating a classic of children’s literature that has endured for nearly a century and successfully launched the Little House series.” - William Anderson, editor of Wilder’s Selected Letters

About Pioneer Girl: Pioneer Girl: The Path into Fiction traces the evolution of Wilder’s matter-of-fact memoir of her girlhood in Wisconsin into a bestselling novel for children. Along the way, editor Nancy Tystad Koupal discloses previously unknown aspects of this story as she examines the various drafts of Little House in the Big Woods.

The third volume in the Pioneer Girl Project series, Pioneer Girl: The Path into Fiction follows Wilder as she steps away from autobiography and into the world of fiction. Wilder handed her memoir over to her daughter, novelist and journalist Rose Wilder Lane, for editing, but when the revised versions of Pioneer Girl failed to attract a publisher, Lane reframed the Wisconsin portion of her mother’s autobiography as juvenile fiction. The resulting twenty-one-page picture-book manuscript, When Grandma Was a Little Girl, featured Pa’s well-honed tales told within the cozy Ingalls home in 1870s Wisconsin. This manuscript captured the attention of a New York publisher, who wanted more words―15,000 more words―about pioneer life for readers aged eight to ten. Accepting the challenge, Wilder returned to Pioneer Girl for additional material. As she wrote, she created multiple drafts and a completed manuscript for Lane to edit and type.