Sherman Alexie, as one of the best-known Native American authors in the United States, grew up on a Spokane Indian reservation enclosed by poverty, alcoholism, disease, and against all odds, transpired to become one of the best American writers under forty according to The New Yorker and Granta (Cline 197). Moreover, the New Yorker named Alexie one of the top twenty writers for the twenty-first century (Anonymous 35). Chadwyck-Healey (1) stated that Alexie was influenced by the poetry of Allen Ginsberg, William Faulkner, John Steinbeck, Jess Row, and the prose of William Burroughs. Alexie produced three novels, nine books of poetry, and two collections of short stories in less than nine years. Alexie’s 2007 book, The Absolutely True Diary of
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The feeling of despair, guilt, and helplessness that overwhelms Indians as they give up on life and slip into unemployment and alcoholism are the major themes of this book. Alexie’s first novel, Reservation Blues, won Booklist’s Editors’ Choice Award for Fiction, follows Thomas Builds-the-Fire as he forms a rock n’ roll band and tries to succeed in the music industry. The story line is referenced to religion, race relations, alcoholism, and leaving the Indian life of poverty on the reservation, and prosper somewhere else as Alexie did in his adolescence (Chadwyck-Healey 2). A New York Times Notable Book (Anonymous 35), Indian Killer, Alexie’s most commercially successful thriller novel so far, features John Smith, a Native American serial killer, cheated of his cultural inheritance, he targets young white males. However, Alexie uses the genre to make a solemn topic about why a Native American outsider might want revenge on a civilization that almost exterminated his cultural identity (Chadwyck-Healey 2-3). A collection of nine stories, Ten Little Indians, explores the state of Indian Americans in contemporary U.S. society and the stereotypes associated with …show more content…
Alexie is currently working on Fire with Fire and The Magic and Tragic Year of My Broken Thumb, sequels to The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven and The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (Anonymous 35). Alexie lives in Seattle, Washington with his wife Diane, who is of Hidatsa, Ho Chunk, and Pottawatomi descent, and two sons (Chadwyck-Healey 6; Cline
The feeling of despair, guilt, and helplessness that overwhelms Indians as they give up on life and slip into unemployment and alcoholism are the major themes of this book. Alexie’s first novel, Reservation Blues, won Booklist’s Editors’ Choice Award for Fiction, follows Thomas Builds-the-Fire as he forms a rock n’ roll band and tries to succeed in the music industry. The story line is referenced to religion, race relations, alcoholism, and leaving the Indian life of poverty on the reservation, and prosper somewhere else as Alexie did in his adolescence (Chadwyck-Healey 2). A New York Times Notable Book (Anonymous 35), Indian Killer, Alexie’s most commercially successful thriller novel so far, features John Smith, a Native American serial killer, cheated of his cultural inheritance, he targets young white males. However, Alexie uses the genre to make a solemn topic about why a Native American outsider might want revenge on a civilization that almost exterminated his cultural identity (Chadwyck-Healey 2-3). A collection of nine stories, Ten Little Indians, explores the state of Indian Americans in contemporary U.S. society and the stereotypes associated with …show more content…
Alexie is currently working on Fire with Fire and The Magic and Tragic Year of My Broken Thumb, sequels to The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven and The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (Anonymous 35). Alexie lives in Seattle, Washington with his wife Diane, who is of Hidatsa, Ho Chunk, and Pottawatomi descent, and two sons (Chadwyck-Healey 6; Cline