Louise Erdrich Overview

Louise Erdrich is one of those multifaceted writers who can deftly maneuver the demands of poet, novelist and critic. Succeeding in both critically and popularly in each category, her work has established her at the forefront of the "Native American Renaissance".... [more]

Louise Erdrich is one of those multifaceted writers who can deftly maneuver the demands of poet, novelist and critic. Succeeding in both critically and popularly in each category, her work has established her at the forefront of the "Native American Renaissance". Accordingly, many have compared her contributions to the genre as to that of Richard Wright and James Baldwin for what those writers achieved on behalf of African Americans. Regardless of what shape or category her writing falls into, she prefers to be defined singularly, as a storyteller. Like many Native American writers, Erdrich attributes her narrative success to her heritage. As she told Writer's Digest contributor Michael Schumacher, "People in [Native American] families make everything into a story. . . . People just sit and the stories start coming, one after another. I suppose that when you grow up constantly hearing the stories rise, break, and fall, it gets into you somehow." Hence, Erdrich's own life story inevitably textured her artistic output. Erdrich, the oldest of seven children, was born in Little Falls, Minnesota, on June 7, 1954. The daughter of French Ojibwe mother and German American father, Louise Erdrich is a member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa. Erdrich attended Dartmouth College in 1972 as part of the school's first coeducational class. In that same year, Michael Dorris moved to Hanover, New Hampshire, to join Dartmouth's Native American Studies Department. Louise took one of Michael's seminars; they became friends and kept in touch after she graduated. At Dartmouth, Professor A. B. Paulsen noticed Erdrich's poetic talent. Later Louise published a poem in Ms. Magazine, and was awarded an American Academy of Poets Prize during her junior year. After completing her undergraduate degree, Erdrich taught poetry and writing to young people through a position at the State Arts Council of North Dakota. She worked a variety of low-paying jobs, from waitressing to weighing trucks on the interstate. Experiences that have percolated into Erdrich's fiction. Erdrich was soon awarded a fellowship to be part of John Hopkins University's writing program in 1979. Erdrich and Dorris met again at Dartmouth, where Louise had been invited to give a reading. Their subsequent correspondence took flight with the exchanging of manuscripts and quickly evolved into romance deepened by their creative collaborations. They were married in 1981 and continued to influence, contribute to and inspire one another's work. During their marriage they considered themselves as each other's greatest literary influences. They publicly said that they collaborated on every single piece of writing, every single word. Unfortunately, this partnership proved itself unsustainable. The two separated in 1995; Dorris committed suicide in March 1997. Nonetheless, Erdrich has continued to produce works of poetry and fiction, expanding her epic and extensively interconnected body of work. Emerging from a culture of value for the land, Erdrich's narratives are inextricably tied to a sense of place. She has created her own mythical landscape in and around Argus, a fictional Red River Valley reservation town on the Minnesota-North Dakota border, and has also manufactured an eccentric cast of characters who appear and re-appear throughout her many novels set there. Consequently, her writing, her entire body of work, is greatly symptomatic of an entire culture held together by stories. "Erdrich's tales are not sequels in the traditional sense," wrote Katie Bacon in Atlantic Unbound. "Rather, they are an intricate web of stories, told from different points in time and different points of view, one whose pattern only becomes clear when you step back and view it from a distance." [show less]