Throughout a writing career that spanned half a century, Frederick Manfred rarely felt himself successful. In 1981, on the eve of his seventieth birthday, he wrote to one friend that despite twenty-five published books and fine critical attention from scholars, his books still begged for general recognition. To another friend he wrote, "I've built a mountain range out here on the prairie and no amount of freezing or momentary neglect will wipe them out. My books may have to wait as long as Melville's Moby Dick . . . but they'll eventually be found." Manfred's prairie is that region of America that he named "Siouxland," adjacent parts of Minnesota, Iowa, Nebraska, and South Dakota--and regions west.

Manfred contended throughout his life, right up to his death from a brain tumor on 7 September 1994, that publishers in the East, who dominated the book industry, rarely understood what he was trying to do in his...