Sherman Alexie's meteoric rise to national prominence among Native American writers occurred in a period of less than five years, beginning not with a blockbuster novel published by a major commercial press but with a slender collection of poems and stories issued by a small publisher. Several of the poems and stories included in that eighty-three-page book, The Business of Fancydancing (1992), had previously appeared in small, respectable literary magazines such as Black Bear Review, Chiron Review, and ZYZZYVA, but nothing Alexie had published had drawn widespread attention.

Certainly, Alexie's rapid rise is due in part to timing. His book happened to be among the several books by Native American writers reviewed for the 3 May 1992 issue of The New York Times Book Review by James R. Kincaid, who singled out the twenty-five-year-old Washingtonian as "one of the major lyric voices of our time." Also, Alexie's career commenced at a...