Research Guide to American Literature

Erdrich entered Dartmouth College in 1972, the first year it admitted
women. She graduated in 1976 and went on to earn a master’s degree in creative
writing from Johns Hopkins University in 1979. In 1981 she married Michael
Dorris, director of the Native American Studies Program at Dartmouth (the
first such program in the United States). He had adopted three Native Ameri-
can children, Abel, Madeline, and Jeffrey Sava; in 1989 Dorris published the
National Book Award–winning The Broken Cord, detailing Abel’s struggles
growing up with fetal alcohol syndrome. Together Erdrich and Dorris had three
daughters, Persia, Pallas, and Aza.
Erdrich and Dorris’s marriage created a fruitful literary partnership. Early
on, they wrote romance stories under the pen name “Milou North,” and Dor-
ris set himself up as Erdrich’s agent. They talked through story and character
ideas with each other and published one novel, The Crown of Columbus (1991),
under both their names. They separated in 1995, and in 1997 Dorris commit-
ted suicide. Erdrich said that she knew from the second year of their marriage
that Dorris suffered from depression severe enough to result in suicide. She
gave birth to a fourth daughter in 2001. In addition to her writing career, she
has established an independent bookstore, Birchbark Books, in Minneapolis,
where she resides.
Erdrich’s reservation novels—Love Medicine; The Beet Queen (1986); Tracks
(1988); The Bingo Palace (1994); The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse
(2001), nominated for the National Book Award; and Four Souls (2004)—dra-
matize the lives, loves, and feuds of the Pillager, Kashpaw, Nanapush, Lamartine,
Morissey, and Lazarre families, all Ojibwe or mixed Ojibwe and French. Tales of
Burning Love (1997) is not set on a reservation; but several key characters come
from the world of the reservation novels, and one scene retells the story of June
Kashpaw’s death, the opening scene of Love Medicine, from a different perspec-
tive. Her other novels are The Antelope Wife (1998); The Master Butchers Singing
Club (2003), which dramatizes the lives of German immigrants living near the
reservation; The Painted Drum (2005); and The Plague of Doves (2008). Erdrich’s
short stories are collected in The Red Convertible: Selected and New Stories (2009).
She has written five children’s books set in early Native American cultures and
has published three volumes of poetry. She also wrote a memoir of pregnancy, The
Blue Jay’s Dance: A Birthyear (1995). Of interest to students wishing to learn more
about Ojibwe culture is her Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country (2003).
Several of the chapters in Love Medicine were first published as short stories,
leading some scholars to suggest that the work should be considered a short-story
cycle. Erdrich revised the stories as she wove them into a larger narrative; in 1993
she added four new chapters and expanded a fifth to delineate the relationships
among characters in greater detail and to strengthen ties to the reservation novels
published after it. In 2009 she published another revision, deleting two of the
chapters added in the 1993 edition. Students might wish to compare the versions
of Love Medicine to determine the impact of the revisions on the cohesiveness and
the focus of the story. Alternatively, students could compare one of the original
short stories to its revision as a chapter in the novel. The copyright page provides
information as to where to find the stories.

Louise Erdrich 22