One of the best-known children's authors, Laura Ingalls Wilder wrote the popular, autobiographical "Little House" novels about her late-nineteenth-century childhood on the American frontier. Published in the 1930s and 1940s, these eight books were considered classics of children's literature by the 1950s and have appealed to every succeeding generation of readers who thirsted for nostalgia.

The second of four daughters of Charles and Caroline Ingalls, a post-Civil War American pioneering family, Wilder began writing in childhood. Laura and her sisters penned poetry and compositions in the many homes the Ingalls family built in the wilderness. Her writing permitted her to have a voice, public and private, denied to many nineteenth-century women and provided a way to release her frustrations, disappointments, and enthusiasms during her life as pioneer, teacher, wife, mother, farmer, businesswoman, and author. Wilder continued her writing after she married her...