Erdrich, Louise (1954-…), is an American author known for novels and short stories rooted in her Native American heritage. Erdrich’s mother was Chippewa, and her father was German American. Many of Erdrich’s characters have mixed Native American and European backgrounds and deal with issues of cultural identity.
Erdrich’s works explore problems facing Native Americans in the modern world. They also draw upon Chippewa culture, mythology, and storytelling traditions. Most of Erdrich’s fiction is set in Minnesota and North Dakota. Erdrich uses several novels to tell the story of interconnected characters over a long period in a single small area.
Karen Louise Erdrich was born on June 7, 1954, in Little Falls, Minnesota. She grew up in North Dakota. She earned a bachelor’s degree from Dartmouth College in 1976 and a master’s degree from Johns Hopkins University in 1979. In 1981, she married Michael Dorris, a writer and professor of Native American Studies at Dartmouth. Erdrich and Dorris worked closely together on her novels until he died by suicide in 1997. In 2001, Erdrich founded a bookstore in Minneapolis, Minnesota, called Birchbark Books. The shop specializes in books and other materials related to Indigenous American life and culture.
Erdrich won praise for her first novel, Love Medicine (1984, revised 1993, 2009). The story uses several narrators to explore the lives of a group of Native Americans living on the Turtle Mountain Reservation in North Dakota. The story was the first of four related novels that deal with three families of mixed ancestry in North Dakota from 1912 through the 1980’s. The other novels in the series are The Beet Queen (1986), Tracks (1988), and The Bingo Palace (1994).
Erdrich’s later novels include The Crown of Columbus (1991, written with Dorris);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), a sequel to Tracks; The Painted Drum (2005); The Plague of Doves (2009); and Shadow Tag (2010). The Round House (2012) won the 2012 National Book Award as best novel of the year. Erdrich also wrote LaRose (2016) and Future Home of the Living God (2017). She won the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for fiction for The Night Watchman (2020). The book weaves together a family story and an account of Chippewa efforts to preserve the tribe’s land and treaty rights in the mid-1900’s. The Sentence (2021), set in a bookstore in Minneapolis after the killing of George Floyd in 2020, is both a murder mystery and a ghost story.
Erdrich has also written children’s books, including Grandmother’s Pigeon (1996), The Porcupine Year (2008), and a series called the “Birchbark House.” The series, based on Erdrich’s family history, is about Chippewa families during the 1800’s. It began with The Birchbark House (1999).
Erdrich’s short stories were collected in The Red Convertible (2009). Her poetry was collected in Jacklight (1984), Baptism of Desire (1989), and Original Fire (2003). She has written a memoir called The Blue Jay’s Dance: A Birth Year (1995).
