Laura Ingalls Wilder
1867-1957

Noted author Laura Ingalls Wilder came to De Smet, South Dakota, from Wisconsin in time to experience the hard winter of 1880-1881. At the age of fifteen, she taught in rural schools in Kingsbury County. In 1894, she and her husband Almanzo Wilder moved to Mansfield, Missouri.

Wilder's only daughter, novelist Rose Lane, persuaded her mother to write stories about her childhood, and Wilder's Little House in the Big Woods was published in 1932. Its immediate success led to the writing and publishing of seven more "Little House" books, four of which are set in South Dakota.

Wilder retired from writing at age seventy-six. The Laura Ingalls Wilder Award for contributions to children's literature was established in her honor.

A more detailed profile is printed in Volume 5 Number 4 of South Dakota History, the journal of the South Dakota State Historical Society.