Louise Erdrich, like many of the characters in her novels and short stories, is part Native American, part something else - in her case, her family is a mixture of a German-American father and a Chippewa mother. Erdrich's parents worked for the Bureau of Indian Affairs as teachers on a nearby North Dakota reservation and she recalls that her father regularly recited memorized poetry - Frost and Byron - to her and her six siblings. Erdrich started her literary career as a poet, supporting herself by working at a Kentucky Fried Chicken and on road construction crews.
At 28, Erdrich published her first novel Love Medicine - which had been rejected by numerous publishing houses - when her husband, the author Michael Dorris, resubmitted it, posing as her literary agent.
Despite a modest first print run, "Love Medicine" was a phenomenal word-of-mouth success, selling 400,000 copies in hardback and winning the 1984 National Book Critics Circle Award.
She followed with three bestsellers: The Beet Queen, Tracks, and The Bingo Palace.
After corresponding with Michael Dorris, her former anthropology professor, who was also of Native American descent, she began to collaborate with him on short fiction and they were married in 1981 until his recent suicide.
Erdrich's works focus on Native American characters. Magic is an important theme in her works, which are marked by a lyrical prose.
In an article for Salon with Robert Spillman, Erdrich talked about some of the influences that have affected her as a writer and some of the things that she is trying to do as a writer. Much of her work comes from her own experiences, which paradoxically makes them harder to write about as she gets older.
[My characters] are certainly not galley slaves. I cannot call them up at will. When I was younger I used to take it for granted that they would be there when I needed to write about them. That's not true anymore. I've used up a lot of th...