Dee Brown is the author of some thirty books of fiction and nonfiction, including the critically acclaimed and worldwide bestseller, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. Published in 1970, that history of the "winning" of the American West as told from the viewpoint of the Native Americans who were dispossessed in the process has sold over five million copies and has been translated into fifteen languages. Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee is also indicative of Brown's interests, techniques, and themes. Most of his works, both fiction and nonfiction, deal with Western history, are told in a strong narrative voice by focusing on individual lives emblematic of certain periods and concerns, and examine with a critical eye the side effects of the westward march of "progress."

Writing in Dictionary of Literary Biography Yearbook: 1980, Winifred Farrant Bevilacqua insightfully summed up Brown's literary achievement. "Viewing history as the interaction of many...