Once upon a time, sixty years ago, a little girl lived in the Big Woods of Wisconsin, in a little gray house made of logs.

So begins the fascinating chronicle of Laura Ingalls Wilder, one of the best-loved American writers of the twentieth century, who grew up with the young country, following the Western trails in a covered wagon with her remarkable family. At the age of sixty-three, Wilder began writing her "Little House" books, a fictional series that reflects the essential truth of the pioneer experience and of the Ingalls family who lived it. "I wanted the children now to understand more about the beginning of things, to know what is behind the things they see--what it is that made America as they know it," Wilder said in a 1937 Bookweek address. "I had seen the whole frontier; the woods, the Indian country of the great plains, the...