Louise Erdrich

Template:Short description Template:Use mdy dates Template:Infobox writer Karen Louise Erdrich (Template:IPAc-en Template:Respell;<ref>Template:Cite webTemplate:Cbignore</ref> born June 7, 1954)<ref name="Stookey1999">Template:Cite book</ref> is a Native American author of novels, poetry, and children's books featuring Native American characters and settings. She is an enrolled citizen of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians of North Dakota, a federally recognized Ojibwe people.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref><ref name="davies">Template:Cite news</ref>

Erdrich is widely acclaimed as one of the most significant writers of the second wave of the Native American Renaissance. She has written 28 books in all, including fiction, non-fiction, poetry, and children's books. In 2009, her novel The Plague of Doves was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and received an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award.<ref name="anisfield-wolf">Template:Cite web</ref> In November 2012, she received the National Book Award for Fiction for her novel The Round House.<ref name=nyt2012>Template:Cite news</ref> She is a 2013 recipient of the Alex Awards. She was awarded the Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction at the National Book Festival in September 2015.<ref name="alter">Template:Cite web</ref> In 2021, she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for her novel The Night Watchman.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

She was married to author Michael Dorris and the two collaborated on a number of works. The couple separated in 1995 and then divorced in 1996; Dorris would also take his own life in 1997 as allegations that he sexually abused at least three of the daughters whom he raised with Erdrich were under investigation.<ref name=dorris /><ref name=dorrisaccused /><ref name=divorceandaccusations />

She is also the owner of Birchbark Books, a small independent bookstore in Minneapolis that focuses on Native American literature and the Native community in the Twin Cities.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

Personal life

Erdrich was born on June 7, 1954, in Little Falls, Minnesota. She was the oldest of seven children born to Ralph Erdrich, a German-American, and Rita (née Gourneau), an Ojibwe woman of French descent.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> Both parents taught at a boarding school in Wahpeton, North Dakota, set up by the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Erdrich's maternal grandfather, Patrick Gourneau, served as tribal chairman for the federally recognized tribe of Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians for many years.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref> Though not raised in a reservation, she often visited relatives there.<ref name=":0">Template:Cite book</ref> She was raised "with all the accepted truths" of Catholicism.<ref name=":0" />

While Erdrich was a child, her father paid her a nickel for every story she wrote. Her sister Heidi became a poet and also lives in Minnesota; she publishes under the name Heid E. Erdrich.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> Their sister Lise Erdrich has written children's books and collections of fiction and essays.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

Erdrich attended Dartmouth College from 1972 to 1976.<ref name="Louise Erdrich 2010">Template:Cite web</ref> She was a part of the first class of women admitted to the college and earned a B.A. in English. During her first year, Erdrich met Michael Dorris, an anthropologist, writer, and then-director of the new Native American Studies program. While attending Dorris' class, she began to look into her own ancestry, which inspired her to draw from it for her literary work, such as poems, short stories, and novels. During that time, she worked as a lifeguard, waitress, researcher for films,<ref name=":1">Template:Cite book</ref> and as an editor for the Boston Indian Council newspaper The Circle.<ref name=":0" />

In 1978, Erdrich enrolled in a Master of Arts program at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. She earned the Master of Arts in the Writing Seminars in 1979.<ref name="Louise Erdrich 2010"/> Erdrich later published some of the poems and stories she wrote while in the M.A. program. She returned to Dartmouth as a writer-in-residence.<ref name="Louise Erdrich 2010"/>

After graduating from Dartmouth, Erdrich remained in contact with Dorris. He attended one of her poetry readings, became impressed with her work, and developed an interest in working with her.<ref name=":0" /> Although Erdrich and Dorris were on two different sides of the world, Erdrich in Boston and Dorris in New Zealand for field research, the two began to collaborate on short stories.

The pair's literary partnership led them to a romantic relationship. They married in 1981, and raised three children whom Dorris had adopted as a single parent (Reynold Abel, Madeline, and Sava<ref name=":0" />) and three biological children together (Persia, Pallas, and Aza Marion<ref name=":2">Template:Cite web</ref>). Reynold Abel suffered from fetal alcohol syndrome and in 1991, at age 23, he was killed when he was hit by a car.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> In 1995, their son Sava accused Dorris of committing child abuse;<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> in 1997, after Dorris' death, his adopted daughter Madeline claimed that Dorris had sexually abused her and Erdrich had neglected to stop the abuse.<ref name=":3">Template:Cite web</ref>

Dorris and Erdrich separated in 1995,<ref name=dorris /> and would divorce in 1996.<ref name=divorceandaccusations>Template:Cite book</ref> Dorris, who was accused of sexually abusing two of the biological daughters he had with Erdrich,<ref name=dorrisaccused>Template:Cite book</ref> died by suicide in 1997. In his will, he omitted Erdrich and his adopted children Sava and Madeline;<ref name=":3" /> Madeline accused Dorris of sexually abusing her as well.<ref name=dorris>Template:Cite book</ref>

In 2001, at age 47, Erdrich gave birth to a daughter, Azure, whose Native American father Erdrich declines to identify publicly.<ref>Template:Cite magazine</ref> She discusses her pregnancy with Azure, and Azure's father, in her 2003 nonfiction book, Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country.<ref name=":4">Template:Cite web</ref> She uses the name "Tobasonakwut" to refer to him.<ref name=":5">Template:Cite book</ref><ref>Template:Cite journal</ref> He is described as a traditional healer and teacher, who is eighteen years Erdrich's senior and a married man.<ref name=":5" /><ref name=":4" /> In a number of publications, Tobasonakwut Kinew, who died in 2012, is referred to as Erdrich's partner and the father of Azure.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref>

When asked in an interview if writing is a lonely life for her, Erdrich replied, "Strangely, I think it is. I am surrounded by an abundance of family and friends and yet I am alone with the writing. And that is perfect." Erdrich lives in Minneapolis.<ref name="Interview">Template:Cite journal</ref>

Work

In 1979, she wrote "The World's Greatest Fisherman",<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> a short story about June Kashpaw, a divorced Ojibwe woman whose death by hypothermia brought her relatives home to a fictional North Dakota reservation for her funeral. She wrote this while "barricaded in the kitchen."<ref name=":0" /> At her husband's urging, she submitted it to the Nelson Algren Short Fiction competition in 1982 for which it won the $5,000 prize,<ref name=":0" /> and eventually it became the first chapter of her debut novel, Love Medicine, published by Holt, Rinehart, and Winston in 1984.<ref name="Interview" />

"When I found out about the prize I was living on a farm in New Hampshire near the college I'd attended," Erdrich told an interviewer. "I was nearly broke and driving a car with bald tires. My mother knitted my sweaters, and all else I bought at thrift stores ... The recognition dazzled me. Later, I became friends with Studs Terkel and Kay Boyle, the judges, toward whom I carry a lifelong gratitude. This prize made an immense difference in my life."<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

Love Medicine won the 1984 National Book Critics Circle Award.<ref name="Author: Louise Erdrich">Template:Cite web</ref> It is the only debut novel ever to receive that honor.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref> Erdrich later turned Love Medicine into a tetralogy that includes The Beet Queen (1986), Tracks (1988), and The Bingo Palace (1994). It has also been featured on the National Advanced Placement Test for Literature.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

In the early years of their marriage, Erdrich and Michael Dorris often collaborated on their work, saying they plotted the books together, "talk about them before any writing is done, and then we share almost every day, whatever it is we've written" but "the person whose name is on the books is the one who's done most of the primary writing.<ref name=":1" />" They got started with "domestic, romantic stuff" published under the shared pen name of "Milou North" (Michael + Louise + where they live).<ref name=":0" />

During the publication of Love Medicine, Erdrich produced her first collection of poems, Jacklight (1984), which highlights the struggles between Native and non-Native cultures, as well as celebrating family, ties of kinship, autobiographical meditations, monologues, and love poetry. She incorporates elements of Ojibwe myths and legends.<ref name="Louise Erdrich 2010"/> Erdrich continues to write poems, which have been included in her collections.

Erdrich is best known as a novelist, and has published a dozen award-winning and best-selling novels.<ref name="Louise Erdrich 2010" /> She followed Love Medicine with The Beet Queen (1986), which continued her technique of using multiple narrators<ref>Template:Cite news</ref> and expanded the fictional reservation universe of Love Medicine to include the nearby town of Argus, North Dakota. The action of the novel takes place mostly before World War II. Leslie Marmon Silko accused Erdrich's The Beet Queen of being more concerned with postmodern technique than with the political struggles of Native peoples.<ref>Susan Castillo "Postmodernism, Native American Literature, and the Real: The Silko-Erdrich Controversy" in Notes from the Periphery: Marginality in North American Literature and Culture New York: Peter Lang, 1995. 179–190.</ref>

Tracks (1988) goes back to the early 20th century at the formation of the reservation. It introduces the trickster figure of Nanapush, who owes a clear debt to Ojibwe figure Nanabozho.<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref> There are many studies of the trickster figure in Erdrich's novels. Tracks shows early clashes between traditional ways and the Roman Catholic Church. The Bingo Palace (1994), set in the 1980s, describes the effects of a casino and a factory on the reservation community. Tales of Burning Love (1997) finishes the story of Sister Leopolda, a recurring character from all the previous books, and introduces a new set of European-American people into the reservation universe.

The Antelope Wife (1998), Erdrich's first novel after her divorce from Dorris, was the first of her novels to be set outside the continuity of the previous books.<ref name="Stookey1999"/> Erdrich heavily revised the book in 2009 and published the revision as The Antelope Woman in 2016.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

She subsequently returned to the reservation and nearby towns. She has published five novels since 1998 dealing with events in that fictional area. Among these are The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse (2001) and The Master Butchers Singing Club (2003). Both novels have geographic and character connections with The Beet Queen. In 2009, Erdrich was a Pulitzer Prize finalist for The Plague of Doves<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> and a National Book Award finalist for The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> The Plague of Doves focuses on the historical lynching of four Native people wrongly accused of murdering a White family, and the effect of this injustice on the following generations. Her Pulitzer Prize–winning novel The Night Watchman<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> (2020) concerns a campaign to defeat the 'termination bill' (introduced by Senator Arthur Vivian Watkins), and Erdrich acknowledged her sources and its inspiration being her maternal grandfather's life.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> Her most recent novel, The Sentence, tells the fictional story of a haunting at Erdrich's Minneapolis bookstore, set against the backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic, George Floyd's murder, and the resulting protests.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref>

She also writes for younger audiences; she has a children's picture book Grandmother's Pigeon, and her children's book The Birchbark House, was a National Book Award finalist.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> She continued the series with The Game of Silence, winner of the Scott O'Dell Award for Historical Fiction,<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> The Porcupine Year, Chickadee, and Makoons.

Nonfiction and teaching

In addition to fiction and poetry, Erdrich has published nonfiction. The Blue Jay's Dance (1995) is about her pregnancy and the birth of her third child.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country (2003) traces her travels in northern Minnesota and Ontario's lakes following the birth of her youngest daughter.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

Influence and style

Her heritage from both parents is influential in her life and prominent in her work.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> Although many of Erdrich's works explore her Native American heritage, her novel The Master Butchers Singing Club (2003) featured the European, specifically German, side of her ancestry. The novel includes stories of a World War I veteran of the German Army and is set in a small North Dakota town.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref> The novel was a finalist for the National Book Award.

Erdrich's interwoven series of novels have drawn comparisons with William Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha novels. Like Faulkner's, Erdrich's successive novels created multiple narratives in the same fictional area and combined the tapestry of local history with current themes and modern consciousness.<ref>See, e.g., Powell's Books (book review), The Christian Science Monitor, August 2, 2004</ref>

Birchbark Books

Template:Main page Erdrich's bookstore hosts literary readings and other events. Her new works are read here, and events celebrate the works and careers of other writers as well, particularly local Native writers. Erdrich and her staff consider Birchbark Books to be a "teaching bookstore".<ref name="birchbarkbooks1">Template:Cite web</ref> In addition to books, the store sells Native American art and traditional medicines, and Native American jewelry. Wiigwaas Press, a small nonprofit publisher founded by Erdrich and her sister, is affiliated with the store.<ref name="birchbarkbooks1"/>

Awards

Literary prizes

• 1983 Pushcart Prize in Poetry<ref>Template:Cite encyclopedia</ref>
• 1984 National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction for Love Medicine<ref name="Author: Louise Erdrich" />
• 1984 Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction for Love Medicine<ref name=":0" />
• 1984 Virginia McCormick Scully Literary Award for Best Book of 1984 dealing with Indians or Chicanos for Love Medicine<ref name=":0" />
• 1985 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction, Love Medicine<ref name=":1" />
• 1987 O. Henry Award for the short story "Fleur" (published in Esquire, August 1986)<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>
• 1999 World Fantasy Award—Novel for The Antelope Wife<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>
• 2006 Scott O'Dell Award for Historical Fiction for the children's book "The Game of Silence"<ref>[1] Template:Webarchive</ref>
• 2009 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Plague of Doves<ref name="anisfield-wolf" />
• 2012 National Book Award for Fiction for The Round House<ref>Template:Cite web</ref><ref>Template:Cite web</ref>
• 2013 Scott O'Dell Award for Historical Fiction for Chickadee
• 2014 Dayton Literary Peace Prize, Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award<ref>Template:Cite news</ref>
• 2016 National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction for LaRose<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>
• 2021 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for The Night Watchman<ref name=":6">Template:Cite web</ref><ref name=":7">Template:Cite news</ref>
• 2023 Prix Femina étranger for The Sentence (its French translation La Sentence)<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

Honors

• 1975 American Academy of Poets Prize<ref name=":2" />
• 1980 MacDowell Fellowship<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>
• 1985 Guggenheim Fellowship in Creative Arts<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>
• 2000 Lifetime Achievement Award from the Native Writers' Circle of the Americas<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>
• 2005 Associate Poet Laureate of North Dakota<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>
• 2007 Honorary Doctorate from the University of North Dakota; refused by Erdrich because of her opposition to the university's North Dakota Fighting Sioux mascot<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>
• 2009 Honorary Doctorate (Doctor of Letters) from Dartmouth College<ref>Template:Cite web</ref><ref>Template:Cite web</ref>
• 2009 Kenyon Review Award for Literary Achievement<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>
• 2013 Rough Rider Award<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>
• 2014 PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>
• 2015 Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction<ref name="alter" />
• 2022 Berresford Prize for significant contributions to the advancement and care of artists in society<ref>Template:Cite news</ref>

See also

• List of Indigenous writers of the Americas
• Joy Harjo
• Terese Marie Mailhot

External links

• Western American Literature Journal: Louise Erdrich
• Template:Cite web
• Template:ISFDB name
• Template:Cite web 35 catalog records
• Female Native Authors For Your Reading List