5/24/2021 We who hail from this neck of the woods hate to brag, but we have a world-renowned author living in our area. OK, so she is no longer physically with us anymore or even alive for that matter. But Laura Ingalls Wilder is very much a living force in the town of De Smet, South Dakota. Like every schoolchild in America, I grew up reading Laura’s Little House series of books. (We locals feel that we know her well enough to be on a first-name basis.) When I was a kid, the fact that Laura had lived in De Smet, only 30 miles from our farm, didn’t impress me at all. I assumed that this was the way things are, that everyone had a literary icon from their area.