Biography Essay

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 Euramerican heritages. Nevertheless, her diverse imageries, subjects, and textual strategies reaffirm imperatives of American Indian survival. In her essay "Where I Ought to Be: A Writer's Sense of Place" (1985) she prescribes the literary challenge for herself and other contemporary Native writers: "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 7June 1954 in Little Falls, Minnesota, into a family of storytellers and survivors. Her mother, Rita Joanne Gourneau Erdrich, was a daughter of Turtle Mountain...