Laura Ingalls Wilder (1867–1957) was born in a log cabin in the Wisconsin woods. With her family, she pioneered throughout America’s heartland during the 1870s and 1880s, finally settling in Dakota Territory. She married Almanzo Wilder in 1885; their only daughter, Rose, was born the following year. The Wilders moved to Rocky Ridge Farm at Mansfield, Missouri, in 1894, where they established a permanent home. After years of farming, Laura wrote the first of her beloved Little House books in 1932. The nine Little House books are international classics. Her writings live on into the twenty-first century as America’s quintessential pioneer story.

Cherry Jones won the Tony^® Award for best actress for both The Heiress and Doubt, and received two Tony^® nominations for her work in A Moon for the Misbegotten and Our Country's Good; she can be seen in the films The Perfect Storm, Erin Brockovich, The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, and Cold Mountain.