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Louise Erdrich

Also known as: Milou North, Karen Louise Erdrich, (Karen) Louise Erdrich, Heidi Louise

Birth: June 7, 1954 in Little Falls, Minnesota, United States
Nationality: American
Ethnicity: Native American
Occupation: Writer, Bookstore owner
Source: Authors and Artists for Young Adults, Volume 47. Gale Group, 2003.
Updated: 07/08/2004

BIOGRAPHICAL ESSAY

Like William Faulkner and his Yoknapatawpha County, American writer Louise Erdrich 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. These include the Lamartine, Pillager, Morrisey, and Kashpaw families, as well as Father Damien, Nanapush, Dot Adare, Pauline Puyrat, and a score of others who weave in and out of 1984's Love Medicine through 2001's The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse and beyond. Readers of further titles in Erdrich's loosely connected series, including The Bingo Palace, The Beet Queen, Tracks, and Tales of Burning Love will recognize and empathize with these old friends, though with The Antelope Wife Erdrich branches out to introduce new locations in the region and two new families. "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."

As a Native American author, Erdrich has also been compared to Richard Wright and James Baldwin for what those writers achieved on behalf of African Americans, as well as to Philip Roth due to his Jewish narratives. Erdrich is credited with bringing Native Americans into mainstream fiction and inspiring an entire generation of new voices in Native-American literature. The daughter of a French-Ojibwe mother and a German-American father, Erdrich explores Native-American themes in her works, with major characters representing both sides of her heritage. She takes a close--sometimes near-horrific, sometimes humorous--look at the meetings of these two cultures, which sometimes clash, sometimes co-mingle. Drawing on her Chippewa/Ojibwe heritage, Erdrich examines the complex relationships--both familial and sexual--between Midwestern Native Americans and their neighboring white communities.

The first in a multi-part series, Love Medicine traces two Native-American families from 1934 to 1984 in a unique seven-narrator format through fourteen interconnected stories, and thereby sets the design for further novels with their non-chronological, episodic approach. The novel was extremely well received, earning its author numerous awards, including the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1984. Other novels from Erdrich have been equally well received. As Mark Anthony Rolo, executive director of the Minnesota-based Native American Journalists Association, told John Habich in the Minneapolis, Minnesota Star Tribune, "[Erdrich] is the first writer to humanize Indians. She allows their complexities to come out, their contradictions, their faults even."

Storytelling as Cultural Artifact

Erdrich's interest in writing can be traced to her childhood and 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." The oldest in a family of seven children, she was born on June 7, 1954, in Little Falls, Minnesota, and raised in Wahpeton, North Dakota. Her Chippewa or Ojibwe grandfather had been the tribal chairman of the nearby Turtle Mountain Reservation, and her parents worked at the Bureau of Indian Falls boarding school. Erdrich once commented on the way in which her parents encouraged her writing: "My father used to give me a nickel for every story I wrote, and my mother wove strips of construction paper together and stapled them into book covers. So at an early age I felt myself to be a published author earning substantial royalties."

Erdrich's mother was born on the Turtle Mountain Chippewa reservation, where her grandfather was tribal chairman, and though she never lived on the reservation, Erdrich visited it often. She told Joseph Bruchac in Survival This Way: Interviews with American Indian Poets that she was very close to her grandfather. "He is funny, he's charming, he's interesting." Erdrich also admired the manner in which he could navigate two very different cultures, keeping the old traditions while dealing with the world the Europeans had created. In addition, her grandfather was a wonderful storyteller, instilling a love for story in his young granddaughter. Such traditional storytelling affected Erdrich greatly, and her novels of Chippewa life mimic the varied points of view and time span of the traditional Chippewa story cycle. Erdrich credits also a youth spent without the distraction of television as being influential in her narrative impulse. Most of her early schooling was spent in public schools in Wahpeton, though she also attended a parochial school.

Erdrich entered Dartmouth College in 1972, the year the college began admitting women, as well as the year the Native American studies department was established. The author's future husband and collaborator, anthropologist Michael Dorris, was hired to chair the department. In his class, Erdrich began the exploration of her ancestry that would eventually inspire her novels. Intent on balancing her academic training with a broad range of practical knowledge, she told Miriam Berkley in an interview with Publishers Weekly, "I ended up taking some really crazy jobs, and I'm glad I did. They turned out to have been very useful experiences, although I never would have believed it at the time." In addition to working as a lifeguard, waitress, poetry teacher at prisons, and construction flag signaler, Erdrich became an editor for the Circle, a Boston Indian Council newspaper. She told Schumacher, "Settling into that job and becoming comfortable with an urban community--which is very different from the reservation community--gave me another reference point. There were lots of people with mixed blood, lots of people who had their own confusions. I realized that this was part of my life--it wasn't something that I was making up--and that it was something I wanted to write about." In 1978 the author enrolled in an M.A. program at Johns Hopkins University, where she wrote poems and stories incorporating her heritage, many of which would later become part of her books. She also began sending her work to publishers, most of whom sent back rejection slips.

Years of Collaboration

After receiving her master's degree, Erdrich returned to Dartmouth as a writer-in-residence. Dorris, with whom she had remained in touch, attended a reading of her poetry there and was impressed. A writer himself--Dorris later published the best-selling novel A Yellow Raft in Blue Water and receive the 1989 National Book Critics Circle Award for his nonfiction work The Broken Cord--Dorris became interested in working with Erdrich and getting to know her better. When he left for New Zealand to do field research and Erdrich went to Boston to work on a textbook, the two began sending their poetry and fiction back and forth with their letters, laying a groundwork for a literary relationship. Dorris returned to New Hampshire in 1980, and Erdrich moved back there as well. The two began collaborating on short stories, including one titled "The World's Greatest Fisherman." When this story won five thousand dollars in the Nelson Algren fiction competition, Erdrich and Dorris decided to expand it into a novel--Love Medicine. At the same time, their literary relationship led to a romantic one and in 1981 they were married.

The titles Erdrich and Dorris chose for their novels--such as Love Medicine and A Yellow Raft in Blue Water--contain rich poetic or visual images and were often the initial inspiration from which their novels were drawn. Erdrich told Schumacher, "I think a title is like a magnet: It begins to draw these scraps of experience or conversation or memory to it. Eventually, it collects a book." Erdrich and Dorris's collaborative process began with a first draft, usually written by whoever had the original idea for the book, the one who would ultimately be considered the official author. After the draft was written, the other person edited it, and then another draft was written; often five or six drafts would be written in all. Finally, the two read the work aloud until they agreed on each word. Although the author had the original voice and the final say, ultimately, both collaborators were responsible for what the work became. This "unique collaborative relationship," according to Alice Joyce in Booklist, is covered in Conversations with Louise Erdrich and Michael Dorris, a collection of twenty-five interviews with the couple.

Together the couple worked on short stories, poetry, and novels, and had six children together, three of their own and three adopted. One of their children was tragically killed in 1991, causing a major rift in the relationship. That year The Crown of Columbus was published, the only novel to actually have both authors' names on it, as well as a book of travel essays, Route Two. The marriage continued to unravel, and the couple later separated. Allegations of sexual abuse were leveled at Dorris before his tragic suicide in 1997.

The North Dakota Saga

The 1982 short story "The World's Greatest Fisherman" introduces two of the families that go on to appear in Erdrich's novels of North Dakota. Love Medicine, The Beet Queen, Tracks, The Bingo Palace, Tales of Burning Love, and The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse encompass the stories of several interrelated families living in and around a reservation in the fictional town of Argus, North Dakota, from 1912 through the 1980s. The novels have been compared to those of Faulkner not only for the creation of this mythical landscape, but also due to the multi-voice narration and non-chronological storytelling the Southern writer employed in works such as As I Lay Dying. Erdrich's works, linked by recurring characters who are victims of fate and the patterns set by their elders, are structured like intricate puzzles in which bits of information about individuals and their relations to one another are slowly released in a seemingly random order, until three-dimensional characters--with a future and a past--are revealed. Through her characters' antics, Erdrich explores universal family life-cycles while also communicating a sense of the changes and loss involved in the twentieth-century Native American experience.

Poet Robert Bly, describing Erdrich's nonlinear storytelling approach in the New York Times Book Review, emphasized her tendency to "choose a few minutes or a day in 1932, let one character talk, let another talk, and a third, then leap to 1941 and then to 1950 or 1964." The novels' circular format is a reflection of the way in which the works are constructed. Although Erdrich is dealing with a specific and extensive time period, "The writing doesn't start out and proceed chronologically. It never seems to start in the beginning. Rather, it's as though we're building something around a center, but that center can be anywhere." Love Medicine, the first in the cycle, appeared in 1984. "With this impressive debut," stated New York Times Book Review contributor Marco Portales, "Louise Erdrich enters the company of America's better novelists."

Love Medicine, named for the belief in love potions which is a part of Chippewa folklore, explores the bonds of family and faith that preserve both the Chippewa tribal community and the individuals that comprise it. The novel begins at a family gathering following the death of June Kashpaw, a prostitute. The characters introduce one another, sharing stories about June that reveal their family history and their cultural beliefs. Albertine Johnson, June's niece, introduces her grandmother, Marie, her grandfather, Nector, and Nector's twin brother, Eli. Eli represents the old way, the Native American who never integrated into the white culture. He also plays a major role in Tracks, in which he appears as a young man. The story of Marie and Nector brings together many of the important images in the novel, including the notion of "love medicine." As a teenager in a convent, Marie is nearly burned to death by a nun who, in an attempt to exorcize the devil from within her, pours boiling water on Marie. Immediately following this incident, Marie is sexually assaulted by Nector. Marie and Nector are later married, but in middle age, Nector begins an affair with Lulu Lamartine, a married woman. In an attempt to rekindle Nector and Marie's passion, their grandson Lipsha prepares "love medicine" for Nector. But Lipsha has difficulty obtaining a wild goose heart for the potion. He substitutes a frozen turkey heart, which causes Nector to choke to death.

Reviewers responded positively to Erdrich's debut novel, citing its lyrical qualities as well as the rich characters who inhabit it. New York Times contributor D. J. R. Bruckner was impressed with Erdrich's "mastery of words," as well as the "vividly drawn" characters who "will not leave the mind once they are let in." Portales, who called Love Medicine "an engrossing book," applauded the unique narration technique which produces what he termed "a wondrous prose song."

After the publication of Love Medicine, Erdrich told reviewers that her next novel would focus less exclusively on her mother's side, embracing the author's mixed heritage and the mixed community in which she grew up. 1986's The Beet Queen deals with whites and half-breeds as well as American Indians, and explores the interactions between these worlds. The story begins in 1932, during the Depression. Mary and Karl Adare's recently widowed mother flies off with a carnival pilot, abandoning the two children and their newborn brother. The baby is taken by a young couple who have just lost their child, while Karl and eleven-year-old Mary ride a freight train to Argus, seeking refuge with their aunt and uncle. When they arrive in the town, however, Karl, frightened by a dog, runs back onto the train and winds up at an orphanage. Mary grows up with her aunt and uncle, and the novel follows her life--as well as those of her jealous, self-centered cousin Sita and their part-Chippewa friend Celestine James--for the next forty years, tracing the themes of separation and loss that began with Mary's father's death and her mother's grand departure.

The Beet Queen was well received by critics, some of whom found it even more impressive than Love Medicine. Many noted the novel's poetic language and symbolism; Bly noted that Erdrich's "genius is in metaphor," and that the characters "show a convincing ability to feel an image with their whole bodies." Josh Rubins, writing in the New York Review of Books, called The Beet Queen "a rare second novel, one that makes it seem as if the first, impressive as it was, promised too little, not too much."

Other reviewers had problems with The Beet Queen, but they tended to dismiss the novel's flaws in light of its positive qualities. New Republic contributor Dorothy Wickenden considered the characters unrealistic and the ending contrived, but she lauded The Beet Queen's "ringing clarity and lyricism," as well as the "assured, polished quality" she felt was missing in Love Medicine. Although Michiko Kakutani found the ending artificial, the New York Times reviewer called Erdrich "an immensely gifted young writer." "Even with its weaknesses," proclaimed Linda Simon in Commonweal, "The Beet Queen stands as a product of enormous talent."

After Erdrich completed The Beet Queen, she was uncertain as to what her next project should be. The four-hundred-page manuscript that would eventually become Tracks had remained untouched for ten years; the author referred to it as her "burden." She and Dorris took a fresh look at it and decided they could relate it to Love Medicine and The Beet Queen. While more political than her previous novels, Tracks also deals with spiritual themes, exploring the tension between ancient Native American beliefs and Christian notions held by Europeans. The novel takes place between 1912 and 1924, before the settings of Erdrich's other novels, and reveals the roots of Love Medicine's characters and their hardships. One of the narrators, Nanapush, is the leader of a tribe that is suffering on account of the white government's exploitation. He feels pressured to give up tribal land in order to avoid starvation. While Nanapush represents the old way, Pauline, the other narrator, represents change. The future mother of Love Medicine's Marie Lazarre, Pauline is a young half-breed from a mixed-blood tribe "for which the name was lost." She feels torn between her Indian faith and the white people's religion, and is considering leaving the reservation. At the center of Tracks is Fleur, a character whom Los Angeles Times Book Review contributor Terry Tempest Williams called "one of the most haunting presences in contemporary American literature." Nanapush discovers this young woman--the last survivor of a family killed by consumption--in a cabin in the woods, starving and mad. Nanapush adopts Fleur and nurses her back to health.

Reviewers found Tracks distinctly different from Erdrich's earlier novels, and some felt that it lacks the characteristics that made Love Medicine and The Beet Queen so outstanding. Washington Post Book World critic Jonathan Yardley wrote that, on account of its more political focus, the work has a "labored quality," while Robert Towers stated in New York Review of Books that he found the characters melodramatic and the tone overly intense. Katherine Dieckmann, writing in the Voice Literary Supplement, affirmed that she "missed [Erdrich's] skilled multiplications of voice," and called the relationship between Pauline and Nanapush "symptomatic of the overall lack of grand orchestration and perspectival interplay that made Erdrich's first two novels polyphonic masterpieces." According to Commonweal contributor Christopher Vecsey, however, although "a reviewer might find some of the prose overwrought, and the two narrative voices indistinguishable . . . readers will appreciate and applaud the vigor and inventiveness of the author."

Some reviewers enjoyed Tracks even more than the earlier novels. Williams stated that Erdrich's writing "has never appeared more polished and grounded," and added, "Tracks may be the story of our time." Thomas M. Disch lauded the novel's plot, with its surprising twists and turns, in the Chicago Tribune. The critic added, "Louise Erdrich is like one of those rumored drugs that are instantly and forever addictive. Fortunately in her case you can just say yes."

A Hiatus from Argus

Tracks was the last new North Dakota novel for six years. In 1991 Erdrich and Dorris's jointly authored The Crown of Columbus appeared, exploring Native American issues from the standpoint of the authors' own experience rather than that of their ancestors. Marking the quincentennial anniversary of Spanish explorer Christopher Columbus's voyage in a not-so-celebratory fashion, Erdrich and Dorris raise important questions about the meaning of that voyage for both Europeans and Native Americans today. The story is narrated by the two central characters, both Dartmouth professors involved in projects concerning Columbus. Vivian Twostar is a Native-American single mother with eclectic tastes and a teenage son, Nash. Vivian is asked to write an academic article on Columbus from a Native-American perspective and is researching Columbus's diaries. Roger Williams, a stuffy New England Protestant poet, is writing an epic work about the explorer's voyage. Vivian and Roger become lovers, parenting a girl named Violet, but have little in common. Ultimately acknowledging the destructive impact of Columbus's voyage on the Native American people, they each vow to redress the political wrongs symbolically by changing the power structure in their relationship. In the end, as Vivian and Roger rediscover themselves, they rediscover America.

Some reviewers found The Crown of Columbus unbelievable and inconsistent, and consider it less praiseworthy than the individual authors' earlier works. However, New York Times Book Review contributor Robert Houston appreciated the novel's timely political relevance, noting "moments of genuine humor and compassion, of real insight and sound satire." Other critics also considered Vivian and Roger's adventures amusing, vibrant, and charming.

Erdrich turned to her own experience as a mother of six children for her next work, The Blue Jay's Dance. Her first book of nonfiction, The Blue Jay's Dance chronicles Erdrich's pregnancy and the birth year of her child. The title refers to a blue jay's habit of defiantly "dancing" towards an attacking hawk, Erdrich's metaphor for "the sort of controlled recklessness that having children always is," noted Jane Aspinall in Quill & Quire. Erdrich has been somewhat protective of her family's privacy and has stated the narrative actually describes a combination of her experience with several of her children. Sue Halpern in the New York Times Book Review remarked on this difficult balancing act between public and private lives but found that Erdrich's "ambivalence inspires trust . . . and suggests that she is the kind of mother whose story should be told."

Some reviewers averred that Erdrich's description of the maternal relationship is a powerful one; "the bond between mother and infant has rarely been captured so well," commented a Kirkus Reviews contributor. While the subject of pregnancy and motherhood is not a new one, Halpern noted that the book provides new insight into the topic: "What makes The Blue Jay's Dance worth reading is that it quietly places a mother's love and nurturance amid her love for the natural world and suggests . . . how right that placement is." Although the Kirkus reviewer contributor found The Blue Jay's Dance to be "occasionally too self-conscious about the importance of Erdrich's role as Writer," others commented positively on the book's examination of the balance between the work of parenting and one's vocation. A Los Angeles Times reviewer remarked: "this book is really about working and having children, staying alert and . . . focused through the first year of a child's life."

Erdrich retained her focus on children with her first children's book, Grandmother's Pigeon. Published in 1996, it is a fanciful tale of an adventurous grandmother who heads to Greenland on the back of a porpoise, leaving behind grandchildren and three bird's eggs in her cluttered bedroom. The eggs hatch into passenger pigeons, thought to be extinct, through which the children are able to send messages to their missing grandmother. A Publishers Weekly reviewer commented, "As in her fiction for adults . . . , Erdrich makes every word count in her bewitching debut children's story."

Another title for young readers, The Birchbark House, contains "a title and structure that inescapably recall Laura Ingalls Wilder's family stories," according to a Horn Book contributor. Omakayas, a seven-year-old Ojibwe girl, lives on an island in Lake Superior at the time whites are beginning to settle the land and displace the native population. The young girl's days are filled with hard work, but also a love for the old ways, but the whites hover at the frame of the story, their smallpox decimating the natives. "Erdrich is reversing the narrative perspective used in most children's stories about nineteenth-century Native Americans," remarked Mary Harris Russell in the New York Times Book Review. "Instead of looking out at `them' as dangerous curiosities, Erdrich . . . wants to tell about `us' from the inside." Booklist contributor Hazel Rochman also praised this different perspective on an old story: "`Little House' readers will discover a new world, a different version of a story they thought they knew." Indeed, Erdrich has remarked that she consciously inverted the "Little House on the Prairie" books to tell the tale of white settlement of Native American lands from the point of view of the dispossessed.

More Tales from Native America

In 1993 Erdrich revised and expanded Love Medicine, adding different perspectives to the tale that deal with different members of the families involved. Then she returned to the descendants of Nanapush with her 1994 novel, The Bingo Palace. The fourth novel in the series that began with Love Medicine, The Bingo Palace weaves together a story of spiritual pursuit with elements of modern reservation life. Erdrich provides continuity to the series by having the novel primarily narrated by Lipsha Morrisey, the illegitimate son of June Kapshaw and Gerry Nanapush from Love Medicine. After working at a Fargo sugar beet factory, Lipsha has returned home to the reservation in search of his life's meaning. He finds work at his uncle Lyman Lamartine's bingo parlor and love with his uncle's girlfriend, Shawnee Ray Toose. Thanks to the magic bingo tickets provided to him by the spirit of his dead mother, June, he also finds modest wealth. The character of Fleur Pillager returns from Tracks as Lipsha's great-grandmother. After visiting her, Lipsha embarks on a spiritual quest in order to impress Shawnee and learn more about his own tribal religious rites. Family members past and present are brought together in his pursuit, which comprises the final pages of the novel.

Reviewers' comments on The Bingo Palace were generally positive. While Lawrence Thornton in the New York Times Book Review found "some of the novel's later ventures into magic realism . . . contrived," his overall impression was positive: "Erdrich's sympathy for her characters shines as luminously as Shawnee Ray's jingle dress." Pam Houston, writing for the Los Angeles Times Book Review, was especially taken by the character of Lipsha Morrisey, finding in him "what makes this her most exciting and satisfying book to date." The Bingo Palace was also reviewed in the context of the series as a whole. Chicago Tribune contributor Michael Upchurch concluded that The Bingo Palace "falls somewhere between Tracks and The Beet Queen in its accomplishment," and added: "The best chapters in The Bingo Palace rival, as Love Medicine did, the work of Welty, Cheever, and Flannery O'Connor."

Erdrich returned to the character of June Kashpaw in her sixth novel, Tales of Burning Love. More accurately, it is the story of June's husband, Jack Mauser, and his five--including June--ex-wives. To begin the tale, Jack meets June while they are both inebriated and marries her that night. In reaction to his inability to consummate their marriage, she walks off into a blizzard and is found dead the next day. His four subsequent marriages share the same elements of tragedy and comedy, culminating in Jack's death in a fire in a house he has built. The story of each marriage is told by the four ex-wives as they are stranded together in Jack's car during a blizzard after his funeral. Again, Erdrich references her previous work in the characters of Gerry and Dot Nanapush, Dot as one of Jack's ex-wives and Gerry as Dot's imprisoned husband.

Reviewers noted Erdrich's masterful descriptions and fine dialogue in this work. According to Penelope Mesic in the Chicago Tribune, "Erdrich's strength is that she gives emotional states--as shifting and intangible, as indefinable as wind--a visible form in metaphor." Times Literary Supplement contributor Lavinia Greenlaw compared her to both Tobias Wolff--like him "she is . . . particularly good at evoking American small-town life and the space that engulfs it"--as well as Raymond Carver, noting her dialogues to be "small exchanges that . . . map out the barely navigable distance between what's heard, what's meant, and what's said." Tales of Burning Love also focuses Erdrich's abilities in depicting the relationship between men and women. Greenlaw continued, "Erdrich also shares Carver's clear and sophisticated view of the more fundamental distance between men and women, and how that, too, is negotiated." However, Mark Childress in the New York Times Book Review commented that while "Jack's wives are vivid and fully realized . . . whenever he's out of sight, he doesn't seem as interesting as the women who loved him."

Explores New Fictional Terrain

While Erdrich covers familiar territory in Tales of Burning Love, she seems to be expanding her focus slightly. Roxana Robinson in Washington Post Book World remarked, "The landscape, instead of being somber and overcast . . . is vividly illuminated by bolts of freewheeling lunacy: This is a mad Gothic comedy." Or as Verlyn Klinkenborg noted in the Los Angeles Times Book Review, "this book marks a shift in . . . [Erdrich's] career, a shift that is suggested rather than fulfilled. . . . there is new country coming into sight, and this novel is her first welcoming account of it."

Part of that "new country" appears in the 1998 novel The Antelope Wife, a departure for Erdrich in her adult novels in its focus on new families, the Roys and the Shawanos, living in contemporary Minneapolis. Erdrich follows these families through failed marriages and forced weddings, as well as tragic deaths. As with all of her novels, the plot here also manages to loop back a century to an attack on an Ojibwe village and a child carried off on the back of a dog. Employing techniques of magical realism, Erdrich tells a tale of the saving power of love. In the opening of the book, Private Scranton Roy follows a runaway dog carrying a baby after his cavalry troops have raided the village. Roy literally nurses the baby back to health and raises her as his own until the baby's mother retrieves her. When her mother dies the girl spends time with a herd of antelope and returns to her village with mysterious powers. Now the Antelope Wife of the title, she is enticed to the city where she becomes the link between several generations of white and Native American families. The book "quickly develops into a madrigal," noted Thomas Curwen in the Los Angeles Times, "a dreamy chorus of voices that rise at times in harmony and other moments in happy dissonance." Generations later, descendants of that raid now live in Minneapolis, coping with life in a variety of ways: some are homeless, others do the nine-to-five routine. Revolving around Rozin Roy and her husband, Richard Whiteheart Beads, Frank and Klaus Shawano, and the Antelope Wife herself, the book is "vintage Erdrich," according to Barbara Hoffert in Library Journal. Hoffert found the novel "absolutely terrific and also a bit disappointing" because "one feels Erdrich has done this all before." Howard Meredith, reviewing The Antelope Wife in World Literature Today, voiced similar concerns, noting "the lack of energy that marks this volume." However, Meredith concluded that in spite of such reservations, "Erdrich remains a significant . . . storyteller." Not all reviewers found such weakness in the novel. Booklist reviewer Bill Ott wrote that "Erdrich's image-rich prose seduces the reader," while Diana Postlethwaite, writing in the New York Times Book Review, remarked that "there is light as well as darkness in this fictional universe, and encountering it offers pain and exhilaration in equal measure." More praise came from Michiko Kakutani in the New York Times, who wrote, "Reading The Antelope Wife offers a rich taste of the bitter and the sweet. Louise Erdrich looks unflinchingly at the human heart." Curwen concluded, "Richly cadenced, deeply textured, Erdrich's writing has the luster and sheen of poetry, each sentence circling deeper into emotion, motivation and rationale, until love touches not eternity but death, transforming The Antelope Wife into a story of longing and longing assuaged, as sustaining as Love Medicine, serious, sometimes flawed but altogether passionate."

In 2001 Erdrich returned to the more familiar ground of an Ojibwe reservation in North Dakota for The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse, a book that she cited as one of the most difficult to write. Not only were there all the characters and events from previous novels to keep track of, but also Erdrich's ambitions for this novel were large. "I wanted it to be written at the level of a poem," she told Alden Mudge in a BookPage interview. "And yet I wanted it to be coherent and have the complexity that it needed. It was hard for me to get there. I threw out huge amounts of paper. I kept the recyclers in business."

In the novel Erdrich reprises a character encountered earlier in her cycle of novels, Father Damien, a Catholic priest. This priest has served the Ojibwe on the remote reservation of Little No Horse, for over half a century, making enormous sacrifices, but also experiencing real joy and contentment. Now, near the end of his life, Father Damien has only one fear: that his true identity will be uncovered. In truth, Father Damien is a woman name Agnes DeWitt who encountered the Father en route to his Indian mission. When he drowned in a flood, Agnes had a mystical experience and decided to assume the priest's identity. She has kept this secret all these years, and now is threatened when a colleague comes to investigate another member of the church, Sister Leopolda, whose piety is under scrutiny. Father Damien alone knows Sister Leopolda's secret, but revealing that might in turn reveal his own secret.

Critical reception to this seventh tale of the North Dakota Ojibwe cycle was laudatory. A reviewer for Publishers Weekly noted that Erdrich "renders her North Dakota world of the Ojibwe with a lyrical and richly metaphoric prose style." The same contributor further noted the "dozens of comic, tragic and all too-human stories" that are woven into her narrative. Time contributor Andrea Sachs called The Last Report "enchanting and absorbing," while Ott noted in Booklist that it was time to acknowledge Erdrich's cycle of novels as "the pinnacle of recent American fiction," and that The Last Report "works beautifully as a reprise of all that has come before." Ott concluded, "This is Erdrich writing at the peak of her powers." Klinkenborg, writing in the New York Times Book Review, dubbed the novel "beguiling," and Kakutani in the New York Times felt that it was a "deeply affecting narrative . . . by turns comical and elegiac, farcical and tragic." Ron Charles, reviewing the novel in the Christian Science Monitor, also had high praise for The Last Report, calling it "one of those wonderful books that's as memorable for its parts as it is for its whole." And Curwen, writing in the Los Angeles Times, felt the book was "messy, ribald, deeply tragic, preposterous and heartfelt," and that in the final analysis it was a love story. "What shine most brightly through its pages," wrote Curwen, "are Erdrich's intelligence and compassion."

Hard at work on further tales from North Dakota and elsewhere, tales that are universal in their telling, Erdrich seems somewhat amazed still by the length and breadth of her literary creations. "I thought I'd written one story," she told Sybil Steinberg in a Publishers Weekly interview. "Then I thought I'd written one book. I never would have imagined that these characters would turn up again and again. But I guess there's some unity of consciousness that underlies your everyday writing that, for me, made going on with these people inevitable." Speaking with Bacon in Atlantic Unbound, Erdrich summed up her own achievement and her technique thusly: "Primarily . . . I am just a storyteller, and I take . . . [stories] where I find them. I love stories whether they function to reclaim old narratives or occur spontaneously. Often, to my surprise, they do both. I'll follow an inner thread of a plot and find that I am actually retelling a very old story, often in a contemporary setting. I usually can't recall whether it is something I heard, or something I dreamed, or read, or imagined on the spot. It all becomes confused and then the characters take over, anyway, and make the piece their own."

UPDATES

July 1, 2004: Erdrich's novel Four Souls was published by HarperCollins. Source: New York Times, www.nytimes.com, July 5, 2004.

PERSONAL INFORMATION

Last name pronounced "Ur-drik"; born June 7, 1954, in Little Falls, MN; daughter of Ralph Louis (a teacher with the Bureau of Indian Affairs) and Rita Joanne (affiliated with the Bureau of Indian Affairs; maiden name, Gourneau) Erdrich; married Michael Anthony Dorris (a writer and professor of Native American studies), October 10, 1981 (died April 11, 1997); children: Reynold Abel (deceased), Jeffrey Sava, Madeline Hannah, Persia Andromeda, Pallas Antigone, Aza Marion, Azure. Education: Dartmouth College, B.A., 1976; Johns Hopkins University, M.A., 1979. Politics: Democrat. Religion: "Anti-religion." Hobbies and other interests: Quilting, running, drawing, "playing chess with daughters and losing, playing piano badly, speaking terrible French." Addresses: Home: Minneapolis, MN.; Agent: c/o Author Mail, HarperCollins, 10 East 53rd St., New York, NY 10022.

AWARDS

Johns Hopkins University teaching fellow, 1978; MacDowell Colony fellow, 1980; Yaddo Colony fellow, 1981; Dartmouth College visiting fellow, 1981; First Prize, Nelson Algren fiction competition, 1982, for "The World's Greatest Fisherman"; National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, 1982; Pushcart Prize, 1983; National Magazine Fiction awards, 1983 and 1987; Virginia McCormack Scully Prize for best book of the year dealing with Indians or Chicanos, and National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction, both 1984, Los Angeles Times Award for best novel, Sue Kaufman Prize for Best First Novel from American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, American Book Award from Before Columbus Foundation, and named among New York Times Book Review's best eleven books of the year, all 1985, all for Love Medicine; Guggenheim fellow, 1985-86; The Beet Queen was named one of Publishers Weekly's best books, 1986; First Prize, O. Henry awards, 1987; National Book Critics Circle Award nomination; World Fantasy Award for Best Novel, World Fantasy Convention, 1999, for The Antelope Wife; National Book Award finalist, for The Birchbark House; Globe & Mail Top Ten Books of the year, and National Book Award for fiction, finalist, both 2001, both for The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse.

CAREER

Writer. North Dakota State Arts Council, visiting poet and teacher, 1977-78; Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, writing instructor, 1978-79; Boston Indian Council, Boston, MA, communications director and editor of The Circle, 1979-80; Charles-Merrill Co., textbook writer, 1980; BirchBark Books, Minneapolis, MN, proprietor, 2000--. Previously employed as a beet weeder in Wahpeton, ND; waitress in Wahpeton, Boston, and Syracuse, NY; psychiatric aide in a Vermont hospital; poetry teacher at prisons; lifeguard; and construction flag signaler. Has judged writing contests.

WORKS

Writings

NOVELS

1984: Love Medicine, Holt (New York, NY), expanded edition, 1993.

1986: The Beet Queen, Holt (New York, NY).

1988: Tracks, Harper (New York, NY).

1991: (With husband, Michael Dorris) The Crown of Columbus, HarperCollins (New York, NY).

1994: The Bingo Palace, HarperCollins (New York, NY).

1996: Tales of Burning Love, HarperCollins (New York, NY).

1998: The Antelope Wife, HarperFlamingo (New York, NY).

2001: The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse, HarperCollins (New York, NY).

OTHER

1980: Imagination (textbook), C. E. Merrill.

1984: Jacklight (poetry), Holt (New York, NY).

1986: Louise Erdrich and Michael Dorris Interview with Kay Bonetti, (sound recording), American Audio Prose Library.

1989: Baptism of Desire (poetry), Harper (New York, NY).

1989: (Author of preface) Michael Dorris, The Broken Cord: A Family's Ongoing Struggle with Fetal Alcohol Syndrome, Harper (New York, NY).

1989: (Author of preface) Desmond Hogan, A Link with the River, Farrar, Straus (New York, NY).

1994: (With Allan Richard Chavkin and Nancy Feyl Chavkin) Conversations with Louise Erdrich and Michael Dorris, University Press of Mississippi (Jackson, MS).

1994: The Falcon: A Narrative of the Captivity and Adventures of John Tanner, Penguin (New York, NY).

1995: The Blue Jay's Dance: A Birth Year (memoir), HarperCollins (New York, NY).

1996: Grandmother's Pigeon (children's book), illustrated by Jim LaMarche, Hyperion (New York, NY).

1999: (And illustrator) The Birchbark House (children's book), Hyperion (New York, NY).

Author of short story "The World's Greatest Fisherman"; contributor to Resurrecting Grace: Remembering Catholic Childhoods, Beacon Press (Boston, MA), 2001; contributor to anthologies, including Norton Anthology of Poetry; Best American Short Stories, 1983 and 1988; and Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards, 1985 and 1987. Contributor of stories, poems, essays, and book reviews to periodicals, including New Yorker, New England Review, Chicago, American Indian Quarterly, Frontiers, Atlantic, Kenyon Review, North American Review, New York Times Book Review, Ms., Redbook (with sister Heidi Erdrich under the joint pseudonym Heidi Louise), and Woman (with Dorris, under the joint pseudonym Milou North).

FURTHER READINGS

Biographical and Critical Sources

BOOKS

Authors and Artists for Young Adults, Volume 10, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1993.

Beacham's Encyclopedia of Popular Fiction, Beacham Publishing (Osprey, FL), Volumes 1, 5, 7, 1996, Volume 11, 1998, Volume 12, 2000.

Bruchac, Joseph, Survival This Way: Interviews with American Indian Poets, Sun Tracks/University of Arizona Press (Tucson, AZ), 1987, pp. 73-86.

Contemporary Literary Criticism, Gale (Detroit, MI), Volume 39, 1986, Volume 54, 1989.

Dictionary of Literary Biography, Gale (Detroit, MI), Volume 152: American Novelists since World War II, Fourth Series, 1995, Volume 175: Native American Writers of the United States, 1997, Volume 206: Twentieth-Century American Western Writers, 1999.

Erdrich, Louise, Tracks, Harper (New York, NY), 1988.

Erdrich, Louise, Baptism of Desire, Harper (New York, NY), 1989.

Jacobs, Connie A., The Novels of Louise Erdrich, Peter Lang (New York, NY), 2001.

Pearlman, Mickey, American Women Writing Fiction: Memory, Identity, Family, Space, University Press of Kentucky (Lexington, KY), 1989, pp. 95-112.

PERIODICALS

America, May 14, 1994, p. 7.

American Indian Culture and Research Journal, 1987, pp. 51-73; spring, 2001, pp. 107-127, 179-180.

American Literature, September, 1990, pp. 405-422.

Atlantic Monthly, April, 2001, p. 104.

Belles Lettres, summer, 1990, pp. 30-31.

Book, May, 2001, Karen Olson, "The Complicated Life of Louise Erdrich," p. 32.

Booklist, January 15, 1995, Alice Joyce, review of Conversations with Louise Erdrich and Michael Dorris, p. 893; March 1, 1998, Bill Ott, review of The Antelope Wife, p. 1044; April 1, 1999, Hazel Rochman, review of The Birchbark House, p. 1427; January 1, 2000, p. 821; April 1, 2000, p. 1481; December 15, 2000, p. 787; February 15, 2001, Bill Ott, review of The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse, p. 1085; October 1, 2001, Joyce Saricks, review of The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse (audio version), p. 343.

Chicago Tribune, September 4, 1988, Thomas M. Disch, review of Tracks, pp. 1, 6; January 1, 1994, Michael Upchurch, review of The Bingo Palace, pp. 1, 9; April 21, 1996, Penelope Mesic, review of Tales of Burning Love, pp. 1, 9.

Christian Science Monitor, April 12, 2000, Ron Charles, "Louise Erdrich Finds More Miracles," p. 18.

College Literature, October, 1991, pp. 80-95.

Commonweal, October 24, 1986, Linda Simon, review of The Beet Queen, pp. 565, 567; November 4, 1988, Christopher Vecsey, review of Tracks, p. 596.

Entertainment Weekly, April 27, 2001, Rebecca Ascher-Walsh, "Past Imperfect," p. 110.

Horn Book, May-June, 1999, review of The Birchbark House, p. 329.

Kirkus Reviews, February 15, 1996, review of The Blue Jay's Dance, p. 244; April 15, 1996, p. 600.

Library Journal, March 15, 1998, Barbara Hoffert, review of The Antelope Wife, p. 92; May 1, 2001, Barbara Hoffert, review of The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse, p. 125.

Los Angeles Times, May 17, 1998, Thomas Curwen, "Love Hurts"; April 15, 2001, Thomas Curwen, "The Making of a Saint," p. BR1.

Los Angeles Times Book Review, October 5, 1986, pp. 3, 10; September 11, 1988, Terry Tempest Williams, review of Tracks, p. 2; May 12, 1991, pp. 3, 13; February 6, 1994, Pam Houston, review of The Bingo Palace, p. 1, 13; May 28, 1995, p. 8; June 16, 1996, Verlyn Klinkenborg, "A Gulliver Shipwrecked on a Coast of Women," pp. 3, 13.

MELUS, summer, 1999, p. 89; fall-winter, 2000, pp. 65, 87.

Nation, October 21, 1991, pp. 465, 486-90.

New Leader, May, 2001, Lynn Sharon Schwartz, "Corporate Sinners and Crossover Saints," p. 35.

New Republic, October 6, 1986, Dorothy Wickenden, review of The Beet Queen, pp. 46-48; January 6-13, 1992, pp. 30-40.

Newsday, November 30, 1986.

Newsweek, March 23, 1998, p. 69.

New York Review of Books, January 15, 1987, Josh Rubins, review of The Beet Queen, pp. 14-15; November 19, 1988, Robert Towers, review or Tracks, pp. 40-41; May 12, 1996, p. 10.

New York Times, December 20, 1984, D. J. R. Bruckner, review of Love Medicine, p. C21; August 20, 1986, Michiko Kakutani, review of The Beet Queen, p. C21; August 24, 1988, p. 41; April 19, 1991, p. C25; March 24, 1998, Michiko Kakutani, review of The Antelope Wife, p. C18; April 6, 2001, Michiko Kakutani, "Saintliness, Too, May Be in the Eye of the Beholder," p. B41.

New York Times Book Review, August 31, 1982, p. 2; December 23, 1984, Marco Portales, review of Love Medicine, p. 6; August 31, 1986, Robert Bly, review of The Beet Queen, p. 2; October 2, 1988, pp. 1, 41-42; April 28, 1991, Robert Houston, review of The Crown of Columbus, p. 10; July 20, 1993, p. 20; January 16, 1994, Lawrence Thornton, review of The Bingo Palace, p. 7; April 16, 1995, Sue Halpern, review of The Blue Jay's Dance, p.14; May 12, 1996, Mark Childress, review of Tales of Burning Love, p. 10; April 12, 1998, Diana Postlethwaite, review of The Antelope Wife, p. 6; July 18, 1999, Mary Harris Russell, review of The Birchbark House, p. 7; April 8, 2001, Verlyn Klinkenborg, "Woman of Cloth," p. 7.

People, June 10, 1991, pp. 26-27; April 23, 2001, p. 47.

Playboy, March, 1994, p. 30.

Publishers Weekly, August 15, 1986, Miriam Berkley, "Louise Erdrich Interview," pp. 58-59; April 22, 1996, review of Grandmother's Pigeon, p. 71; November 1, 1999, p. 58; January 29, 2001, Sybil Steinberg, "PW Talks with Louise Erdrich," p. 64; July 2, 2001, review of The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse (audio version), p. 31.

Quill & Quire, August, 1995, Jane Aspinall, review of The Blue Jay's Dance, p. 30.

School Library Journal, May, 1999, pp. 122-123.

Time, February 7, 1994, p. 71; April 9, 2001, Andrea Sachs, "A Woman with a Habit," p. 78.

Times Literary Supplement, February 14, 1997, Lavinia Greenlaw, review of Tales of Burning Love, p. 21.

Voice Literary Supplement, October, 1988, Katherine Dieckmann, review of Tracks, p. 37.

Washington Post Book World, August 31, 1986, pp. 1, 6; September 18, 1988, Jonathan Yardley, review of Tracks, p. 3; February 6, 1994, p. 5; April 21, 1996, Roxana Robinson, review of Tales of Burning Love, p. 3; April 22, 2001, Ursula K. Le Guin, "Lives of Saint," p. 13.

Western American Literature, February, 1991, pp. 363-364.

World Literature Today, winter, 2000, Howard Meredith, review of The Antelope Wife, p. 214.

Writer's Digest, June, 1991, pp. Michael Schumacher, interview with Louise Erdrich, pp. 28-31.

OTHER

Atlantic Unbound, http://www.theatlantic.com/ (January 17, 2001), Katie Bacon, "An Emissary of the Between-World."

BookPage, http://www.bookpage.com/ (February 28, 2002), Alden Mudge, "Louise Erdrich Explores Mysteries and Miracles on the Reservation."

HarperCollins.com, http://www.harpercollins.com/ (February 28, 2002), "Louise Erdrich: Author Bio."

Startribune.com, http://www.startribune.com/ (December 30, 2001), John Habich, "Louise Erdrich: 2001 Artist of the Year."

SOURCE CITATION

"Louise Erdrich." Authors and Artists for Young Adults, Volume 47. Gale Group, 2003. Reproduced in Biography Resource Center. Farmington Hills, Mich.: Thomson Gale. 2005.