SOURCE: Chavkin, Allan. “Vision and Revision in Louise Erdrich's Love Medicine.” In The Chippewa Landscape of Louise Erdrich, edited by Allan Chavkin, pp. 84-116. Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 1999.

In the following essay, Chavkin compares and contrasts Erdrich's original version of Love Medicine with the 1993 expanded edition, noting similarities and differences throughout the text.

Love Medicine (1984) made Louise Erdrich famous almost overnight. This novel prompted an unusual amount of critical attention, won the National Book Critics Circle Award, and has since become a work frequently anthologized and taught in college. Yet in 1993 Erdrich published the novel again after revising it, adding four new chapters and a new section that became the second part of “The Beads,” and resequencing the chapters; the title page of the book was changed from Love Medicine: A Novel to Love Medicine: New and Expanded Version. Although occasionally writers have revised and “corrected...