Didn't know how much I wanted this until I got it

Pioneer Girl: The Annotated Autobiography
by Laura Ingalls Wilder and Pamela Smith Hill (editor)

If you're a Little House nut like me, you're going to read this.  And no matter how many footnotes there are, you're going to want more.  It would need to footnote every noun and half of the verbs to make me happy.

Editor Pamela smith Hill has taken the unpublished autobiography of Laura Ingalls Wilder and added a buttload of background information in the form of annotations that usually take up more space than text.  The autobiography itself had been rejected by publishers, which you will understand when you read it.  It had no chapter divisions, no coherent flow--it's like a series of diary entries.  Sad as the rejection must have been for Laura and her daughter, it was a good thing for us.  Rose Wilder Lane (daughter) had a reputation for blurring the line between fiction and nonfiction.  Rather than letting her rework and rewrite and fictionalize the original manuscript and end up with something more fiction than non, the rejection spurred Laura to start over and author the Little House series.   Freed by fiction but bound by honesty, she did a beautiful job!   And the original autobiography is left for serious readers to see the fact behind the fiction and marvel at her accomplishment.

The only thing I wish, if history could be reversed, is that Laura had gone back over her original autobiography and fleshed out some of the details.  The act of writing the series probably reminded her of things she'd forgotten--it would be nice to have them put into their true places.

as to the book in my hands...what do I say?   I'm ecstatic to have it.  I'm grateful that Ms. Hill and her collaborators did the research and expended the hours of labor in compiling all of these historical details, biographical snippets, and comparisons with the fictional series that put these dry details into their place.  I don't think there's a single person mentioned that they didn't attempt to track down in real life.

But a couple of things were disappointing to me, so I'll mention them here in hopes that there might be a second edition, revised and expanded.   The editor's referring to Laura as Wilder and Rose as Lane--that was annoying as heck.  Some biographers do use the surname of their subjects, but just as many use the given name and a few vary between the two.  (Which is also irritating.)  But doing it here was just plain stupid.  Laura wasn't even named Wilder until the last few pages!  Would you write a biography of Eleanor Roosevelt and refer to her as "Roosevelt"?   Every single time I read either name--Wilder or Lane--I had to stop, back off, remember who it was talking about, and resume.  Irritated at the interruption.

And while I was thrilled to get the biographical details, I wanted more physical details.  more natural history--more about the animals that Pa hunted or trapped; more about the gardens; more about the plants of the landscapes; more more more.  What else was happening at that time, in the country and the towns of Burr Oak, Walnut Grove, and De Smet?   What were the distinctions between the various religions and churches at the time?  Since Laura spent so much of her young life in school, what were schools really like, in the day?  Some of the things are completely foreign to us nowadays--recitations, mental arithmetic, and diagramming sentences, to name a few.

I'm not saying there wasn't a lot of detail, because there was.  I'm just insatiable.