Nineteenth-Century Literary Criticism | Ridge, John Rollin - Karl Kroeber (essay date 1992)

Karl Kroeber (essay date 1992)

SOURCE: "American Indian Persistence and Resurgence," in boundary 2, Vol. XIX, No. 3, Fall, 1992, pp. 1-25.

[In the following excerpt, Kroeber finds Ridge's novel Joaquín Murieta important as a product of Ridge's cultural identity]

In 1854, John Rollin Ridge, a Cherokee, became the first American Indian to publish a novel, The Life and Adventures of Joaquin Murietta, the Celebrated Bandit. This blood-and-thunder potboiler will never supersede Madame Bovary as an object of stylistic analysis. Its literary interest, in fact, lies in its journalistic character. Ridge wrote the novel to take advantage of the celebrity of its protagonist, a Robin Hood figure who never existed, though a man who claimed to have killed him earned a substantial reward, proving that one should never underestimate the value of myth. For California readers, some of the interest in the "bandit Murietta" may have...

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