JEFFREY BROWN:

She didn't begin to write until she was in her 60s, but Laura Ingalls Wilder's first effort at fiction, "The Little House in the Big Woods," published 1932, was the Egypt of a series about life on the Great Plains of the 19th century that's been treasured by generations of children, selling some 60 million copies and translated into more than 40 languages.

Later generations took to the long-running 1970s TV series based on the books. All of these "Little House on the Prairie" stories were in fact based on Wilder's own life, and it turns out that she originally tried to tell her story in an autobiography, one that was never published.

Now, some 90 years later, the South Dakota Historical Society Press is bring out "Pioneer Girl: The Annotated Biography."

The editor is Pamela Smith Hill, an English professor at Missouri State University who also wrote a biography of Wilder.

And welcome to you.

So, it's interesting. Her first impulse as a writer was to nonfiction.

PAMELA SMITH HILL, "Pioneer Girl: The Annotated Biography": Yes, exactly.

What a lot of people don't understand about Laura Ingalls Wilder is that she actually started her professional writing career as a journalist. She wrote for The Missouri Ruralist, a major farm publication in Missouri in the early 20th century.

So she was used to dealing with facts and reality. And I think that's one of the reasons why she attempted to write an autobiography first.