[In the following interview, Alexie discusses his initiation into literature and his adherence to realism in writing about the American-Indian experience.]

Six years ago, as a 24-year-old student at Washington State University, Sherman Alexie, a Spokane/Coeur d'Alene Indian, set down his career goals at the insistence of a friend: 1) to publish ten books by age 30; 2) to see a book on the silver screen by 35; and 3) to receive a major literary prize by 40.

With Indian Killer his third prose work, a tragic thriller about the ravages of cultural dilution and dissolution, out this month from Grove/Atlantic, and The Summer of Black Widows, his seventh collection of poetry, out in October from Hanging Loose Press, the first goal will be achieved. Three of Alexie's books—his first short-story collection, The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, his novel Reservation Blues and Indian Killer—are the subject of ongoing film negotiations. As for a major literary award, if review acclaim from such established masters as Reynolds Price, Leslie Marmon Silko and Frederick Bausch, not to mention inclusion in the recent “Best of Young American Novelists” issue of Granta, means anything, Alexie could well win his prize.

When asked how sudden success has affected him, Alexie flashes a quick smile and quips: “I like room service.” The remark—even coming from a sometime stand-up comic—is revealing. Self-described as “mouthy, opinionated and arrogant,” Alexie betrays no squeamishness about the mix of art and commerce. He loves the limelight, and his readings are known for their improvisational energy, costume changes and singing. Six years sober after a six-year binge that began the day he entered college, he explains: “Today, I get high, I get drunk off of public readings. I'm good at it. It comes from being a debater in high school, but also, crucially, it comes from the oral tradition of my own culture. It's in performance that the two cultures become one.” Then he laughs, adding: “The most terrifying phrase in the world is when an Indian man grabs a microphone and says ‘I have a few words to say.’”

Alexie has more than a few words to say. His memory runs deep. Whether cast in poetry or prose, his work offers a devastating and deeply human portrait of contemporary Indian life. Greeting PW in the modest Seattle apartment where he lives with his wife of two years, Diane, a beautiful, private woman of Hidatsa/Ho Chunk/Pottawatomi descent, Alexie proves to be affable and generous, ready to sit down around the kitchen table and talk about his life and art.

Tall, handsome, his long black hair tied in a ponytail, dressed casually in a beige knit shirt and khakis, Alexie, who played basketball in high school, has a shooting guard's easy movements and soft touch. One would never suspect that he was born hydrocephalic, endured a brain operation at six months that should have left him mentally retarded—if not dead—and for his first seven years was beset with seizures and medicated with regular doses of lithium, phenobarbital and other sedatives.

The son of Sherman Sr. and Lillian Alexie (his father is Coeur d'Alene, his mother Spokane), Alexie was born and reared in Wellpinit, the only town on the Spokane Indian Reservation—a place he describes as a landscape of “HUD shacks and abandoned cars”—which lies some 50 miles northwest of Spokane, Wash. Alcoholism, a central concern of Alexie's work, afflicted his family, but there was love in the house, along with a mix of traditional and contemporary culture. “I've come to realize my parents did a damn good job, considering the cards they were dealt,” he says.

Then there was his maternal grandmother, Etta Adams, who died when Alexie was eight, and who appears as the eternal, wise and practical “Big Mom” in Reservation Blues. “She was one of the great spiritual leaders of the Spokane tribe,” Alexie says, “one of the most powerful figures to visit the Northwest, and in her last days thousands came to pay their respects.” The need for female strength and wisdom is a primary theme of Alexie's, sounded early on in “Indian Boy Love Songs,” four poems collected in The Business of Fancydancing.

Alexie began reading in earnest at an early age. Because he was unable to participate in the wild athleticism of a young male Indian's rites of passage, books became his world. “I knew what a paragraph was before I could read the words,” he says, claiming that at age six, he began working his way through The Grapes of Wrath. Steinbeck's final image of a starving man being breast-fed is fixed in his mind: “Ah, so that's the way a story's supposed to end,” he recalls telling himself. “With that kind of huge moment, which is the way the stories we tell ourselves end.” Through grade and high school, he devoured every book in the school libraries, reading and re-reading Steinbeck until the copies fell apart in his hands. “I was a total geek,” Alexie recalls, “which automatically made me an outcast, so in order to succeed I had to be smarter than everybody else. My sense of competitiveness came out that way. I was fierce in the classroom, I humiliated everybody and had my nose broken five times after school for being the smart kid.”

Alexie's view of Indian life acquired more complexity when, in 1981, he enrolled at an all-white high school in Reardan, a reservation border town unfriendly to Indians. With his world turned upside-down, he became the “perfect Reardan kid”: an honor student and class president and the only ponytail on the crewcut Reardan Indians basketball team. “I kept my mouth shut and became a good white Indian,” he acknowledges. “All those qualities that made me unpopular on the reservation made me popular at Reardan. It got to the point where I don't think they saw me as Indian.”

The hard work and conformity earned Alexie a scholarship to Gonzaga University in Spokane, where he enrolled with vague intentions of becoming a doctor or lawyer—“the usual options for a bright, brown kid”—and promptly fell apart. Feeling lost, lacking a life plan, he began drinking heavily. His misery found consolation in poetry, which he began to read avidly—Keats, Yeats, Dickinson, Whitman. “I didn't see myself in them,” he says, “so I felt like I was doing anthropology, like I was studying white people. Obviously, something was drawing me in that I couldn't intellectualize or verbalize, and then I realized that the poems weren't just about white people. They were about everybody. I also realized that the poets were outcasts, too,” he chuckles.

After two years, Alexie packed his bags and left Gonzaga for the University of Washington. Newly arrived in Seattle, he was robbed and soon found himself back in Wellpinit, on the verge of joining the long history of young Indians who come home to a slow death by alcohol. Waking one morning on the steps of the Assembly of God Church, hungover, his pants wet, he staggered home to mail off an application to WSU in Pullman. It was a poetry class at WSU taught by Alex Kuo that finally helped him to get his bearings as a writer, he recalls.

The boozing didn't stop, but the words poured out. Kuo, who became a father figure to Alexie, gave him a copy of the anthology Songs of This Earth on Turtle's Back. “In an instant I saw myself in literature,” Alexie recalls. A line from an Adrian C. Louis poem called “Elegy for the Forgotten Oldsmobile” changed his life forever: “O Uncle Adrian! I'm in the reservation of my own mind.” “I started crying. That was my whole life. Forget Steinbeck, forget Keats. I just kept saying that line over and over again. I sat down and started writing poems. And they came. It was scary.”

Under Kuo's guidance, his first semester manuscript became his first book, I Would Steal Horses, which was published by Slipstream in 1992. With Native poets such as Louis and Simon Ortiz, Joy Harjo and Linda Hogan as models, he began to write his own story in his own voice. Lyrical, angry, poignant, socially engaged, the poems found their way into small literary magazines such as Brooklyn's Hanging Loose. Eventually, Hanging Loose Press brought out The Business of Fancydancing, which received a strong critical reception and has sold 11,000 copies, an astounding number for a book of poems from a small press. Serendipitously, the letter accepting the manuscript for publication arrived the day Alexie decided to quit drinking.

During his student days, and at Kuo's urging, Alexie began to experiment with prose—some of which appeared in Fancydancing. Other fictions were later collected in The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, half of which was written in a four-month burst when agents, alert to his poetry, began calling with requests for fiction.

A friend introduced Alexie to Nancy Stauffer, who remains his agent to this day. “Nancy's really been good at helping me develop a career,” he says. “We really have a plan. We're not just going book to book. First and foremost, I want to be a better writer, and I want a larger audience.” In short order, Alexie found himself with a two-book, six-figure contract with Morgan Entrekin at the Atlantic Monthly Press at a time when, he says, he “didn't even have an idea for a novel.”

The idea did come, in the guise of Reservation Blues, a novel that imagines legendary bluesman Robert Johnson arriving on a reservation seeking redemption from “a woman,” in this case Big Mom. Johnson's magic guitar carries four young Indians off the reservation and into the world of rock and roll. The book explores differences between reservation and urban Indians and the effects of the church on traditional people, among other themes. It's also a bleak novel that's leavened by Alexie's signature black humor. “I'm not trying to be funny,” he explains. “I don't sit down to write something funny. In my everyday life I'm funny, and when I write it comes out. Laughter is a ceremony, it's the way people cope.”

There isn't much laughter in Indian Killer, which depicts John Smith, an Indian without a tribal affiliation. Adopted off the reservation and reared by a white couple, he becomes a suspect in a string of brutal scalpings that terrify Seattle. Tangent to Smith are a host of characters, including a racist talk-show host, a white professor of Native American studies and a defiant female Indian activist, all of whom are struggling with their senses of identity. The picture is of a man divided by culture, a culture divided by its tragic history, a city divided by race, and a nation at war with itself. And it is a vision Alexie paints with excruciating clarity.

The perception of being an outcast among outcasts contributes to Alexie's complex portrait of reservation life, a view rife with ironies and a sense of complicity that has come under fire from Indian writers for its apparent emphasis on hopelessness, alcoholism and suicide. “I write what I know,” he says, “and I don't try to mythologize myself, which is what some seem to want, and which some Indian women and men writers are doing, this Earth Mother and Shaman Man thing, trying to create these ‘authentic, traditional’ Indians. We don't live our live that way.”

Well aware that his poems and novels have angered Indians and whites alike, Alexie enjoys walking a kind of cultural highwire. “I use a racial criterion in my literary critiques,” he says. “I have a very specific commitment to Indian people, and I'm very tribal in that sense. I want us to survive as Indians.”

That said, Alexie's Indian characters are never guileless victims. Echoing Big Mom, who continually reminds her neighbors in Reservation Blues that their fate is in their own hands, he explains: “It's a two-way street. The system sets you up to fail, and then, somehow, you choose it.”