The writings of Louise Erdrich not only reflect her multilayered, complex background but also confound a variety of literary genre and cultural categories. Although she is known primarily as a successful contemporary Native American writer, Erdrich's finely polished writing reveals both her Turtle Mountain Chippewa and European American heritages. In her fiction and other writings she plainly regards the survival of American Indian cultures as imperative. She prescribes the literary challenge for herself and other contemporary Native writers in her essay “Where I Ought to Be: A Writer's Sense of Place,” which was published in the 28 July 1985 issue of The New York Times Book Review: “In the light of enormous loss, they must tell the stories of contemporary survivors while protecting and celebrating the cores of cultures left in the wake of the catastrophe.”

Karen Louise Erdrich was born on 7 June 1954 in Little Falls, Minnesota, into a family...