Laura Ingalls Wilder was a pioneer, farmer, and writer, known for a series of eight autobiographical novels about her childhood on the Great Plains, including Little House on the Prairie and The Long Winter, the last five selected as Newbery Honor Books. A ninth, uncompleted novel, The First Four Years, was published after her death. Prairie original.
 

“…I began to think what a wonderful childhood I had had. How I had seen the whole frontier, the woods, the Indian country of the great plains, the frontier towns, the building of railroads in wild, unsettled country, homesteading and farmers coming in to take possession. I realized that I had seen and lived it all—all the successive phases of the frontier, first the frontiersman, then the pioneer, then the farmers and the towns.

            Then I understood that in my own life I represented a whole period of American history.”

            —Laura Ingalls Wilder, Speech at The Book Fair, Detroit, Michigan, October 16, 1937