Louise Erdrich
(1954– )
As a little girl, Louise Erdrich was encouraged to write. Her father gave her a nickel for every story she produced. Her mother wove strips of construction paper into covers and stapled the pages together to make a book. Erdrich says that she felt like a published author when she was still little.
Erdrich is a child of parents from two very different cultures—a German American father and a Chippewa Indian mother. Erdrich says that her interest in writing grew naturally as she listened to the stories of her family and other American Indian families in Wahpeton, North Dakota, where she grew up.
Her diverse heritage has given Erdrich her themes and characters. She is perhaps best known for a series of novels that tell the stories of three interrelated families who live either in or close to an American Indian reservation in North Dakota.
