Erdrich, Louise
Erdrich, Louise( 1954– ),of German and Chippewa descent, grew up in Wahpeton, North Dakota, in the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa. She graduated from Dartmouth College in 1976. In 1984 her collection of poems Jacklight, was published. Love Medicine, her first book of fiction, also published in 1984, won the National Book Critics Circle Award, and established her reputation. Love Medicine is a series of free-standing narratives told by various voices of two families, the Kashpaws and the Lamartines, living on a N.D. reservation between 1934 and 1984. The characters appear in one another's stories. Sadness, humor, and despair of a dispossessed people are well chronicled. The series of stories is continued in The Beet Queen (1986) and Tracks (1988). The Bingo Palace (1994) completes the tetralogy begun with Love Medicine. Lyman Lamartine now owns a bingo parlor, but another member of the...
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