Erdrich, Louise

Award-winning poet, fiction writer, memoirist, and children's book author, Louise Erdrich is one of the most renowned and prolific figures in contemporary American letters. The mother of seven children, with over 20 books to her credit, Erdrich has an impressive literary output as the result of disciplined work habits and an abiding, spiritualized belief in the saving power of story. Part German American and part (on her mother's side) Chippewa, Erdrich helped foment what has been called the Native American Renaissance in literature, drawing attention to the virtues and vices, losses and loves of a fractured but resolute people.

She writes with charged lyricism about the fraught, familial tensions and passions among the Native and European inhabitants of a fictional North Dakota locale—very like the place ...