Louise Erdrich

Who Is Louise Erdrich?

Louise Erdrich is the foremost Native American novelist of her generation and one of the finest American novelists writing today — a writer whose fiction renders the life of the Ojibwe people of North Dakota and Minnesota with a richness, a formal sophistication, and a theological depth that place her among the major literary figures of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Born in Little Falls, Minnesota, in 1954, she is of German-American and Ojibwe descent and grew up in Wahpeton, North Dakota, where her parents taught at a Bureau of Indian Affairs school.

Her first novel, Love Medicine (1984), inaugurated the North Dakota cycle that has occupied most of her career — a series of interconnected novels following several Ojibwe families across multiple generations, from the late nineteenth century to the present. The cycle, which now extends to more than a dozen novels, is one of the most ambitious works of sustained fiction in American literature.

Erdrich is significant for TLA because her fiction holds together, without resolving, the tension between the Ojibwe spiritual tradition and the Catholic Christianity that colonialism brought to her people. Her characters inhabit both worlds simultaneously — the world of trickster spirits and sacred objects and the world of the sacraments and the rosary — and her fiction renders this dual habitation with a honesty and a complexity that neither religious triumphalism nor secular anthropology can match.

In Their Own Words

Selected Bibliography

• Love Medicine — 1984, revised 1993
• The Beet Queen — 1986
• Tracks — 1988
• The Bingo Palace — 1994
• The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse — 2001
• The Painted Drum — 2005
• The Plague of Doves — 2008
• The Round House — 2012 — National Book Award
• LaRose — 2016
• The Night Watchman — 2020 — Pulitzer Prize