Sherman Alexie

Writer

• Born: October 7, 1966
• Place of Birth: Spokane Indian Reservation, Wellpinit, Washington

Biography

Sherman Joseph Alexie Jr., is a prolific writer, most of his work reflecting the nature of life on the Spokane/Coeur d'Alene Indian Reservation in Wellpinit, Washington, and the life of down-and-out American Indians in cities such as Seattle and Spokane. His poetry and short fiction are both marked by a robust humor, which ranges from slapstick to a dry self-deprecation; it is this characteristic tone that generally engages readers and stays with them after the book is finished.

Alexie was born on October 7, 1966, near Spokane, Washington, the son of Sherman Joseph and Lilian Agnes (Cox) Alexie. As a child he experienced seizures and other health issues from congenital hydrocephalus, which influenced his interest in reading. After graduating from high school in 1985, he attended Gonzaga University for two years, dropping out briefly. Once back in Spokane, he enrolled in Washington State University and graduated in 1991.

In 1991, Alexie also received his first high honor: He was named a Poetry Fellow of the Washington State Arts Commission. A year later, he received funds from the National Endowment for the Arts to help him complete his first published volume of poems, I Would Steal Horses, and a collection of poetry and short fiction, The Business of Fancydancing.

The short story collection The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven (1993) marked the beginning of widespread public acclaim for Alexie. It was reviewed by the American poet Reynolds Price in The New York Times Review of Books and other notable critics, earning much praise. Generally remarked on was Alexie's distinctive narrative voice and somber outlook, as well as his joining of contemporary references (for example, basketball and Diet Pepsi) to the search for lost American Indian culture. Although his references to contemporary products have been interpreted as an attempt on Alexie's part to imitate the style of mid-1980s novelists Tama Janowitz and Bret Easton Ellis, it probably is more accurately an ironic trope. In exchange for their culture, Alexie seems to suggest, American Indians have been given Diet Pepsi. The book went on the win the PEN/Hemingway Award for a debut work of fiction. Alexie went on to work some of the material from the collection into a screenplay for the award-winning film Smoke Signals, which was released in 1998 and elected to the Library of Congress's National Film Registry in 2018 as an important work.

One of his more disturbing stories, "Distances," is a post–nuclear holocaust story about life on the reservation: people dying of radiation sickness, mutated plant life, and the breakdown of the tribal council's authority. In this story, the reader is forced to confront the historical apocalypse that brought equally profound changes to American Indians.

In much of Alexie's other fiction, individual Spokane/Coeur d'Alene Indians are unable to pull themselves out of the mire of history, suffering from a variety of physical, psychological, and spiritual complaints. The young basketball star Julius Windmaker in "The Only Traffic Signal on the Reservation Doesn't Flash Red Anymore" is unable to use his athletic talent to escape the cycle of despair, and he ends the story a shambling drunk. In "Because My Father Always Said He Was the Only Indian Who Saw Jimi Hendrix Play 'The Star Spangled Banner' at Woodstock," the narrator describes himself as "half . . . formed by my father's whiskey sperm, the other half formed by my mother's vodka egg." The father in the story can maintain his self-esteem only by listening to the lost voices of other marginalized peoples—Jimi Hendrix and Hank Williams, the black man and the poor hillbilly. Like many other Alexie characters, he is in search of something he cannot find, let alone articulate, but which drives him to alienate his son and wife.

A recurring character, Thomas Builds-the-Fire, in many ways represents Alexie himself. Builds-the-Fire is a young man who keeps telling his stories even though none of the other people on the reservation listen to him. In "The Trial of Thomas Builds-the-Fire," the storyteller is charged with committing murders that had taken place on May 16, 1858. Builds-the-Fire becomes the symbol of all Indians in modern culture, on trial before a white judge and jury. He offers the only defense he is able: a story in which he is alternately a wild horse, an Indian outlaw named Qualchan, and finally a warrior named Wild Coyote. He is found guilty.

Some of Alexie's characters from The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven reappear in the novel Reservation Blues (1995), although Alexie's taste for the surrealistic in fiction is more pronounced in this volume. For example, the character Victor, a modern Spokane Indian, meets the blues legend Robert Johnson (who died in the 1930s) wandering across the reservation. The artists depicted in Alexie's fiction are typically either unheard, marginalized figures or, like Johnson, appreciated only by a restricted coterie of aficionados.

With his reputation established, Alexie continued to write prolifically in a variety of formats. Indian Killer (1996) is a tragic novel. It begins with the virtual kidnapping of a newborn American Indian baby so that a white couple can have a child. When he grows up, John Smith feels alienated but cannot rejoin his people because he does not know his mother's tribe. He moves to Seattle and decides to become an Indian warrior, killing white people as a form of initiation.

Alexie's One Stick Song (2000) is a collection of poems that function as a personal memoir. Its poems are bracketed by two extended autobiographical fragments: "The Unauthorized Biography of Me," which conveys the content of Alexie's mind and spirit through the tone of its observations, and "Sugar Town," a lament for and tribute to his father, as well as a meditation on his own growth toward maturity. That same year, Alexie published a volume of short stories, The Toughest Indian in the World, which was notable for its focus on urban Indians and those who negotiate between reservation life and city life.

Alexie's next fiction collection, Ten Little Indians (2003), received critical acclaim and was a national best seller. One of the stories from the collection, "What You Pawn I will Redeem," in which a homeless man has a day to raise one thousand dollars to redeem a dance outfit stolen from his grandmother, was published in the New Yorker magazine in April 2003.

In 2007 Alexie published two novels for young adults: Flight and The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. The latter won the 2007 National Book Award for young people's literature. However, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian also proved controversial, drawing frequent censorship efforts over its depiction of drug use and profane language. In 2020, the American Library Association named it the number-one most-challenged book of the previous decade in the United States. The book remained the subject of controversy into the 2020s, with school districts in Michigan, Nebraska, Wisconsin, and other states banning or considering a ban on The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian.

In 2010 Alexie's collection of poetry and short fiction War Dances (2009) was chosen as the winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award for fiction, and that same year he received the Native Writers' Circle of the Americas Lifetime Achievement Award. Alexie released Blasphemy, a collection of fifteen new and fifteen selected stories, in 2012. The following year he was awarded the John Dos Passos Prize for Literature.

Alexie published a memoir, You Don't Have to Say You Love Me, in 2017 to much critical acclaim. It was awarded the Carnegie Medal by the American Library Association in early 2018, but the author turned down the honor as multiple allegations that he had engaged in sexual misconduct emerged. Several different women accused Alexie of inappropriate behavior and misuse of his considerable power within the literary community, and especially among American Indian writers. He eventually responded with a public apology, admitting that he had caused harm to others. In response to the scandal the Institute of American Indian Arts removed Alexie's name from one of its scholarship programs.

Bibliography

Alexie, Sherman. "Sherman Alexie, Literary Rebel: An Interview." Interview by John Bellante and Carl Bellante. Bloomsbury Review 14 (May/June, 1994): 14.

Alexie, Sherman. "Sending Cinematic Smoke Signals: An Interview with Sherman Alexie." Interview by Dennis West. CINEASTE 23, no. 4 (1998): 28-32.

Andrews, Scott. "A New Road and a Dead End in Sherman Alexie's Reservation Blues." Arizona Quarterly 63, no. 2 (Summer, 2007): 137-152.

“Banned Books 2024 – The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian." Marshall University, 5 Aug. 2024, www.marshall.edu/library/bannedbooks/the-absolutely-true-diary-of-a-part-time-indian/. Accessed 27 Sept. 2024.

Baxter, Andrea-Bess. "Review of Old Shirts and New Skins, First Indian on the Moon, and The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven." Western American Literature 29, no. 3 (November, 1994): 277-280.

Bellante, John, and Carl Bellante. "Sherman Alexie, Literary Rebel." Bloomsbury Review 14 (May-June, 1994): 14-15, 26.

Bogey, Dan. Review of The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, by Sherman Alexie. Library Journal 118 (September 1, 1993).

Brill, Susan Berry. Contemporary American Indian Literatures and the Oral Tradition. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1999.

Caldwell, E. K. Dreaming the Dawn: Conversations with Native Artists and Activists. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999.

Chen, Tina. "Toward an Ethics of Knowledge." MELUS 30, no. 2 (Summer, 2005): 157-173.

Christie, Stuart. "Renaissance Man: The Tribal 'Schizophrenic' in Sherman Alexie's Indian Killer." American Indian Culture and Research Journal 25, no. 4 (2001): 1-19.

Collins, Cathy. "Top Ten Banned Book: Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian." The Office for Intellectual Freedom of the American Library Association, 28 Apr. 2022, www.oif.ala.org/oif/top-ten-banned-book-absolutely-true-diary-of-a-part-time-indian/. Accessed 27 Sept. 2024.

Fast, Robin Riley. The Heart as a Drum: Continuance and Resistance in American Indian Poetry. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000.

Fleck, Richard F., ed. Critical Perspectives of Native American Fiction. 2d ed. Pueblo, Colo.: Passeggiata Press, 1997.

Grassian, Daniel. Understanding Sherman Alexie. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2005.

Hanson, Elizabeth I. Forever There: Race and Gender in Contemporary Native American Fiction. New York: P. Lang, 1989.

Kilpatrick, Jacquelyn. Celluloid Indians: Native Americans and Film. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999.

Kincaid, James R. "Who Gets to Tell Their Stories?" The New York Times Book Review, May 3, 1992, 1, 24-29.

Lincoln, Kenneth. Native American Renaissance. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983.

Lincoln, Kenneth. Sing with the Heart of a Bear: Fusions of Native and American Poetry, 1890-1999. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000.

Low, Denise. The American Indian Quarterly 20, no. 1 (Winter, 1996): 123-125.

Lundquist, Suzanne Evertsen. Native American Literatures: An Introduction. New York: Continuum, 2004.

McFarland, Ron. "'Another Kind of Violence': Sherman Alexie's Poems." American Indian Quarterly 21, no. 2 (Spring, 1997): 251-264.

Niatum, Duane, ed. Harper's Anthology of Twentieth-Century Native American Poetry. San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1988.

Price, Reynolds. "One Indian Doesn't Tell Another." The New York Times Book Review, October 17, 1993, 15-16.

SAIL: Studies in American Indian Literature 9, no. 4 (Winter, 1997).

Schneider, Brian. Review of The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, by Sherman Alexie. Review of Contemporary Fiction 13 (Fall, 1993).

"Sherman Alexie Apologizes Amid Allegations of Sexual Misconduct." PBS News Hour, 1 Mar. 2018, www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/sherman-alexie-apologizes-amid-allegations-of-sexual-misconduct. Accessed 27 Sept. 2024.

Silko, Leslie Marmon. "Bingo Man—Reservation Blues by Sherman Alexie." Nation 260, no. 23 (June 12, 1995): 856-860.

Vickers, Scott B. Native American Identities: From Stereotype to Archetype in Art and Literature. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1998.

Vizenor, Gerald, ed. Narrative Chance: Postmodern Discourse on Native American Indian Literatures. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1993.