American author Laura Ingalls Wilder (1867-1957) was the creator of the much-loved children's series of "Little House" books that recounted her life as a young girl on the western frontier during the last half of the nineteenth century.

Laura Ingalls Wilder never set out to become a famous writer when she first began jotting down memories of her girlhood on the newly settled American frontier. Her goal, she later explained, was simply to preserve her pioneer family's stories of adventure and discovery. But the unexpected success of her first published book, Little House in the Big Woods (1932), made her stop and realize "what a wonderful childhood I had had," as she remarked in a speech delivered in Detroit in 1937 and excerpted in Something About the Author. "How I had seen the whole frontier, the woods, the Indian country of the great plains, the frontier towns, the building of...