Louise Erdrich was born in Little Falls, Minnesota, and grew up in Wahpeton, North Dakota. Her father was German American and her mother was half French and half Ojibwe (Chippewa), a member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Ojibwe. Erdrich is the oldest of seven children. Her parents taught at the Bureau of Indian Affairs boarding schools while she was growing up.
Erdrich attended Dartmouth and was a member of the first co-ed class admitted by the college. She studied English there and met her future husband Michael Dorris, who was the founder of Dartmouth's then-new Native American Studies program. After graduating in 1976, Erdrich went on to receive an advanced degree in creative writing from Johns Hopkins, and shortly thereafter wrote "The World's Greatest Fisherman," which became the first chapter of Love Medicine. She and her husband had three biological daughters and adopted three more children before their 1995 divorce.
Erdrich has written more than a dozen novels and has won many literary awards, including the National Book Critics Circle Award for Love Medicine and the National Book Award for Fiction for her 2012 novel The Round House. Her books frequently focus on contemporary and historical Native American issues, and many of her writings are centered around characters introduced in Love Medicine. Erdrich presently lives in Minnesota and owns the independent bookstore Birchbark Books.
Louise Erdrich gives the story of Fleur Pillager, a young woman who embarks on a journey to the city to avenge the stealing of her land. Pillager makes her way to the home of James Mauser, the suspected thief. Before leaving for the city, she...
Future Home of the Living God by Louise Erdrich is a fiction novel written in a first-person narrative. The novel is based on the reflections of the narrator, Cedar Hawk Songmaker. The novel was written in the wake of the rise of the abortion...
Originally released in 1984, Love Medicine is Louise Erdrich's first published novel. Initially, Erdrich wrote "The World's Greatest Fisherman" after she earned her master's degree in creative writing, and this short story later became the basis...
The Master Butcher's Singing Club was written in 2003 by Louise Erdirch, a native American writer. It revolves around German American traditions and culture, which is part of Erdrich's personal heritage.
The book follows the lives of Fidelis...
Louise Erdrich's novel The Night Watchman is not just close to her heart because she wrote it; it tells the story of her Native American ancestors who, in the early 1950s, fought against a congressional bill that, in an Orwellian turn of phrase,...
"The Red Convertible" is a short story by American author Louise Erdrich. The story and its characters draw heavily on the author's own partial Native American background: Erdrich is an enrolled member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa...
The Round House is author Louise Erdrich's fourteenth novel, and it was published in 2012. It is sometimes considered a thematic sequel to her 2008 novel, The Plague of the Doves, due to their shared focus on the concepts of justice and revenge....
Tracks is a novel that was written by Louise Erdrich and was published in 1988. It is the third book in a series of four books that tell the story of four Anishinaabe families that are all somehow connected to each other. All of them live on an...
