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Astrid Lindgren's Swedish legacy.

Article Excerpt
In March 1944, Astrid Lindgren slipped on the ice while walking in Stockholm after a snowfall. Laid up with a painful injury, she set to work writing down some stories. Years earlier, ill with pneumonia, her daughter Karin had asked her for stories about a character whose name the feverish child made up on the spot: Pippi Langstrump. The resulting tales became household favorites. On the title page of Lindgren's finished typescript, dedicated to Karin on her tenth birthday, there is a pencil drawing of a girl with a broad smile and braided hair the color of a carrot. She is wearing an asymmetrical dress, oversized shoes, and mismatched stockings. A reproduction of that page now appears on the cover of Ur-Pippi, a newly published book that includes a foreword by Karin Nyman (nee Lindgren), scholarly commentary by Ulla Lundqvist, and the original manuscript text of the book known to speakers of English as Pippi Longstocking.

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Pippi's story begins, "I utkanten av den lilla, lilla staden ..." And that is where Astrid Lindgren began, too: "on the edge of a tiny, little town." She was born on the outskirts of Vimmerby, in the south of Sweden, on November 14, 1907, the child of tenant farmers.

The publication of Ur-Pippi is one of many ways Swedish people are marking the centennial of Lindgren's birth. Fittingly, the book is published by Raben & Sjogren, the company that first published Pippi Langstrump in 1945. Lindgren had sent the original manuscript to a competing house, where it was rejected. She made substantial revisions before she sent the novel to Raben & Sjogren, which eventually published many books by Lindgren and where she worked as a children's book editor....

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