Book

Fallon, Erin. "(Karen) Louise Erdrich." A Reader's Companion to the Short Story in English. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2001. 143-153. Print.

In the book, A Reader's Companion to the Short Story in English, there is an entire chapter dedicated to Louise Erdrich. It discusses her biography, criticism on her work and analysis on her short stories and novels. The biography section is fairly small and just gives the most important details of her life. Such as, her parents and how they encouraged her to write as a child, her family history and background, educational background, her career, and her marriage.

The criticism section essentially praises all of her writings, short stories, and novels. It discusses a majority of awards she received as well. The main writing of Erdrich’s that is most talked about is the novel Love Medicine. A majority of the chapters that are now included in the novel were originally written as short stories. The critics are fascinated at how well she presents the information about the culture of her tribe, the Turtle Mountain Chippewa Tribe. Erdrich’s writing techniques are also said to be very similar to William Faulkner’s. one of the opposites in Erdrich and Faulkner’s writings is that his seem to revolve around white characters with a few Indians, while hers revolve centrally around Indians and have a few white characters thrown in.

In the section talking about the analysis of her fiction writings is talks about how she is constantly revising and expanding her short stories. When she does she, she makes them all “intricately connected to each other.” This process she has done is very helpful for when she puts her short stories into a novel form, like Love Medicine. All of her novels revolve around the Chippewa Indians and her European heritage. The author goes very in depth when discussing her short stories and novels.  A description of several of Erdrich’s stories and novels are given.

I thought this was a very helpful chapter especially if you weren’t very familiar with Louise Erdrich and her writings. It gives great details about her novels and what the critics think about a majority of them. Erdrich’s novels and short stories sound really interesting from how they are described in this chapter. It is always interesting and nice to hear critics say good things about novels about Native American’s. especially since there aren’t many Native American writers, especially women writers.