Research Guides: Louise Erdrich: Biography

Louise Erdrich (Born on June 7, 1954)

The early eighties were breakthrough years for Erdrich. In 1982, she won the first prize of the Nelson Algren Award for her short story “The World’s Greatest Fisherman” as well as a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. The following year, she also won the Pushcart Prize for her poem “Indian Boarding School” and a National Magazine Fiction Award for “Scales,” another short story. In 1984, Erdrich published Jacklight, a poetry collection. It contains humorous Potchikoo poems about the Indian trickster and narrative poems entitled “The Butcher’s Wife,” named Mary Kröger. Continue . . .

Source: Ruoff, A.LaVonne Brown. “Biography of Louise Erdrich.” Critical Insights: Louise Erdrich, Oct. 2012, pp. 18–26. From Literary Reference Center Plus database.

Book Collection

Resources

Louise Erdrich's Tracks: Survival or Subversion The article presents a literary criticism of the book "Tracks" by Louise Erdrich. It analyze priority to one cultural code over another; her literary and cultural hybridization intends to deconstruct binaries like the Europeans versus the Natives. It narrates the lives of some tribal Chippewa families living on a reservation off and around a lake called Matchemanito, where the Native American communities believe a Lake Monster and assimilation of Native Americans.
Louise Erdrich's The Round House, the Wiindigoo, and Star Trek: The Next Generation Since its publication in 2012, the climax to Louise Erdrich's novel The Round House has troubled many readers due to its apparent idealization of vigilante violence. Joe Coutts's execution of Linden Lark, his mother's rapist, feels too easy, too much of a kind with Linden's own vengeful killings. However Erdrich's association of Linden with the Anishinaabe legend of wiindigoo, and Armus -- a sadistic creature from Star Trek: The Next Generation -- reframes this shooting as a ceremonial sacrifice. We can thereby understand Linden's shooting as what Girard termed the pharmakos, the scapegoat that absorbs and personifies the violence of the larger community and whose death therefore helps short-circuit the violence that Erdrich's afterword assures us is still all too frequently perpetrated on our contemporary Native American reservations.
Trickster Lives in Erdrich: Continuity, Innovation, and Eloquence of a Troubling, Beloved Character Ojibwe/Anishnaabe writer Louise Erdrich embraces the complex, paradoxical, and transformative Trickster character type, whose endurance inspires readers. Each of her Tricksters—Potchikoo, Nanapush, Father Damian—is modern to varying degrees, embodying qualities drawn from Anishinaabeg traditions while speaking volumes to today's audiences. Erdrich echoes her Tricksters' mastery of words, telling stories that reflect a violent history and changing yet hopeful present worlds, stories in which updated Tricksters persist, defiantly mocking even death to delight and puzzle us. Erdrich's loquacious, eloquent survivors teach and heal, even while embracing humor and acting foolish or absurd. They speak with powerful voices to mock, navigate, and explicate both tribal and mainstream culture today. Erdrich allows us to embrace this slippery character, who often provokes anxiety in contemporary scholars and writers, long enough for us to appreciate him/her as neither dead, dangerously off-limits, nor incomprehensible, but rather as a voice of survival in the midst of cultural change, worth attending to today. Erdrich offers us all an enduring character who masters stories, lives boldly in our world, and creatively merges the traditional and the contemporary.
Buried alive: the native American political unconscious in Louise Erdrich's fiction This article presents information regarding the native American political consciousness in Louise Erdrich's fiction. In her recent novel, "The Master Butchers Singing Club," Louise Erdrich follows her pattern in several previous works, such as "The Beet Queen," and Tales of Burning Love, by concentrating primarily on the European immigrant communities living in her fictional Argus, North Dakota. Fidelis Waldvogel, the Argus, North Dakota master butcher who organizes the "singing club" of Erdrich's title, grew up in Germany hoping to become a poet and learning the butcher's trade from his father, but his first adult work is as a sniper for the German Army during World War I.
A Conversation with Louise Erdrich Author Louise Erdrich is this year's Read North Dakota special guest. In this author talk, Erdrich shares passages from her newest book "The Round House" and chats with our live studio audience. To learn more about literature created in and about North Dakota, visit the Read North Dakota website at www.readnd.org. Read North Dakota encourages conversation about the people, communities,and values portrayed in books that have helped shape the state. This program is made possible by the partners of Read North Dakota including the North Dakota Humanities Council, a nonprofit, independent state partner of the National Endowment for the Humanities; the North Dakota Council on the Arts; the North Dakota Library Association; the State Historical Society of North Dakota; and the members of Prairie Public. Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in the website do not necessarily reflect those of the North Dakota Humanities Council or the National Endowment for the Humanities.
The power of Louise Erdrich's books ndian Country Today's daily newscast We visit with distinguished storyteller Louise Erdrich about her Pulitzer Prize winning novel "The Night Watchman." Plus, more on how one tribe is caring for its elders.
Louise Erdrich, "The Night Watchman" Louise Erdrich discusses her novel, "The Night Watchman", at Politics and Prose. A national treasure, Erdrich has written about Native American lives in a stream of novels, poetry, children’s books, and memoirs since 1984, winning two National Book Critics Circle Awards, the National Book Award, as well as the Library of Congress Prize in American Fiction, the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction, and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. Set in the 1950s, her latest novel draws on the life of her grandfather, a Chippewa council member and night watchman at a factory near North Dakota’s Turtle Mountain Reservation. As Thomas leads the community’s fight against a government measure to terminate the tribe’s rights to its land, Erdrich skillfully interweaves his story with those of several others—a young woman determined to leave, an aspiring boxer, a white math teacher—tracing the changing goals of Native Americans and the generational impact of the group’s struggle.