Sherman Alexie, The Lone Ranger and Tonto
Fistf ight in Heaven
(New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1993)Sherman Joseph Alexie Jr., an enrolled Spokane from his mother, a social worker,
and Coeur d’Alene on his father’s side, was born hydrocephalic (commonly known
as “water on the brain”) in October 1966. When he underwent brain surgery at
six months of age, doctors expected him to suffer severe brain damage in the
unlikely event that he survived. He not only survived but reports having read John
Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath (1939) at age five, a novel he still claims as one of
his favorites. As a child he suffered seizures and abuse at the hands of bullies due
to his medical problems and his propensity for pastimes, particularly reading, that
were not popular on his reservation. These are all experiences he gives to Arnold
Spirit, the protagonist of his National Book Award–winning young adult novel,
The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (2007).
Alexie credits his father, who worked at various times as a truck driver and
logger and died in 2003 as a result of alcoholism and diabetes, with instilling in
him a love of reading. His relationship with his father was both significant and
frustrating to him, as suggested by the closing words of his introduction to the
tenth-anniversary edition of The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistf ight in Heaven: “the
sons in this book really love and hate their fathers.” A son struggling with feel-
ings of abandonment by his father is the central concern in the film Smoke Signals
(1998), for which Alexie wrote the screeplay, adapting the story “This Is What
It Means to Say Phoenix, Arizona,” from The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistf ight in
Heaven. Alexie became an alcoholic at age eighteen but quit drinking five years
later. He attended Gonzaga University, then transferred to Washington State
University in Pullman. After fainting in human anatomy classes, he gave up his
aspirations to become a doctor and instead became interested in writing poetry
through a class with Alex Kuo, whose gift to him of an anthology titled Songs
From This Earth on Turtle’s Back, edited by Joseph Bruchac (1983), opened Alex-
ie’s eyes to the realization that his experiences could be a subject for literature.
In 1996 Granta magazine named Alexie one of the “Best Young American
Novelists.” By that time he had published more than three hundred poems, six
volumes of poetry, two novels, one short-story collection, and numerous stories,
essays, and reviews. When asked how he was so prolific, he noted that the aver-
age life expectancy of an American Indian man is forty-nine years, and given
how much he felt he had to say and how little time he might have, he needed
to get it out there quickly. This comment illustrates prominent characteristics in
much of Alexie’s writing: his desire to educate the American public about Native
American history and about living conditions on reservations; his wry, acerbic
sense of humor; and his combination of these elements to critique and sometimes
to satirize contemporary culture, especially as it relates to U.S. attitudes about
American Indians.
A younger member of the Native American Literary Renaissance, Alexie
frequently and with passion points to the Indian authors (he prefers the term
“Indian” to “Native American”) who influenced him, including Leslie Marmon