Prolific writer Louise Erdrich was born on June 7, 1954, in Little Falls, Minnesota. When she was a child, her father gave her a nickel for every story she wrote, and he recently gave her a roll of antique nickels, saying “I owe you,” as she told The Paris Review in an interview in 2010.
It must have been a large bag. Erdrich has published 14 novels—her first in 1984 with Love Medicine—as well as several poetry collections, children’s books, short stories, and nonfiction books. A best-selling and a widely-taught author, Erdrich has enjoyed both academic and popular success. Infused with humor and historical detail, the everyday and the fantastical, her writing has been classified by some as magic realism, even as Erdrich insists that her writing comes from ordinary life.
Erdrich is an enrolled member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa, whose reservation is in North Dakota. Erdrich is the first Native writer to win the National Book Award for fiction, which she recently won for The Round House (2012). In her acceptance speech, she used both English and Ojibwe, the language of her Indian ancestors but one she has had to work to learn.
Erdrich’s novels are often set on fictional reservations in North Dakota and include a huge cast of characters, with a minor character in one reappearing in the next in a starring role. Her characters—sometimes quirky, sometimes cruel, but always compassionately drawn—narrate their own stories, giving voice to a wide spectrum of experiences: white, Native, and mixed; poor and middle class; gay, straight, and questioning; traditional, modern, and hybrid.
Erdrich, the oldest of seven children, earned a bachelor’s degree from Dartmouth College, entering as part of the school’s first coeducational class. Erdrich now lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota, where she owns a bookstore, Birchbark Books.
Published books by Louise Erdrich:
Novels
- Love Medicine (1984)
- The Beet Queen (1986)
- Tracks (1988)
- The Crown of Columbus (coauthored with Michael Dorris) (1991)
- The Bingo Palace (1994)
- Tales of Burning Love (1997)
- The Antelope Wife (1998)
- The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse (2001)
- The Master Butchers Singing Club (2003)
- Four Souls (2004)
- The Painted Drum (2005)
- The Plague of Doves (2008)
- Shadow Tag (2010)
- The Round House (2012)
Short story collections
- The Red Convertible: Collected and New Stories 1978-2008 (2009)
Poetry
- Jacklight (1984)
- Baptism of Desire (1989)
- Original Fire: Selected and New Poems (2003)
Children’s literature
- Grandmother’s Pigeon (1996)
- The Birchbark House (1999)
- The Range Eternal (2002)
- The Game of Silence (2005)
- The Porcupine Year (2008)
- Chickadee (2012)
Non-fiction
- Route Two (coauthored with Michael Dorris) (1990)
- The Blue Jay’s Dance: A Birthyear (1995)
- Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country (2003)
As editor or contributor
- Foreword for The Broken Cord by Michael Dorris (1989)
- Editor (with Katrina Kenison) of The Best American Short Stories 1993 (1993)
(post by Alicia Kent)