Poetry Part II: Modernism &
Post-Modernism
20th Century Anglo-Americans
20th century Women Writers
20th century African American Writers
20th century Latin American Writers
20th century Asian-American Writers
20th century Native American Writers
Modern
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Charles Darwin Origin of the Species 1859
Karl Marx Communist Manifesto 1848
Friedrich Nietzsche
Sigmund Freud Interpretation of Dreams
1899
Carl G. Jung
Max Planck quantum theory 1900
Albert Einstein theory of relativity 1905
Heidegger & Sartre
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WW I
Great Depression
WWII-Holocaust & Hiroshima
Cold War Dizzying rapid change
Industrial revolution
Global Village
Artist goes within: Literature is subjective
Pre-occupation with self, nature of consciousness,
perception, fragmentation of experience and thought,
stream-of-consciousness
Questions:
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Existence of God
Human race as ‘Lord of the Jungle’
Reason over emotion
Life is worth living
Reality
Modernism
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Trends in literature in the early 20th century: Symbolism (French poets:
Charles Baudelaire), Futurism (Italian Filippo Marinetti), Expressionism (Kafka,
or German playwrights Georg Buchner & Bertolt Brecht), Imagism (US & Brit.,
Ezra Pound), Vorticism (London also Pound & Wyndham Lewis), Ultraismo
(Spanish poets Guillermo de Torre), Dada (Paris Andre Breton), Surrealism
(Fr/Sp Andre Breton, automatic writing & free association
( A rejection of 19th c. traditions such as: a rejection of realism, or rejection of
traditional metre for free verse
Used different, complex forms and styles including: breaking from
chronological storytelling, stream of conscious writing style, fragmentation of
images, more abstraction,
A rejection of historical continuity—places value and consciousness in the
individual
Objective reasoning was the way to understand the world.
Urban (dissociation) but separate from conventional, middle class, or
capitalist values
Multiple points of view, awareness of psychological theories.
Alfred Edward Housman 18591936
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Educated at St. John’s College, Oxford
A clerk in the Patent Office London
Poet and classical scholar
1911 Professor of Latin at Cambridge
Mother’s early death and father’s distance from family and financial
failures led him to a grim out look on life
Self-critical
Works: Propertius, Ovid, Juvenal, Manilius , Shropshire Lad
(collection of verse), Last Poems (collection), Prefanda, “The Name
and Nature of Poetry”
Interest/inspiration: astronomy, Shakespeare, Hardy, M. Arnold
Grim comedy, ballad or hymns, brief, bleak themes of human
existence, motion/travel, inevitability of death, tumultuous love and
sexuality
William Butler Yeats 1865-1939
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Irish—1916 Irish uprising
Lyric poet, political, manager of Abbey
Theatre,
1923 Nobel Prize for Poetry
1922-8 senator in 1st Irish govt
Inspirations/Influences: Edmund Spenser,
English Romantics, rejection of Victorian
conventions, Irish nationalist,
Occult & national interests, Swedenborg,
Irish mythology & folk tales, Japanese art
Robert Frost 1874-1963
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b. San Francisco, father newspaper editor died when 8 years
old
Mother moved to Massachusettes teacher
Edu. Dartmouth College & Harvard
then worked in mills & farm-Sympathy for working poor
England 1912-15—then a professional writer
“the old-fashioned way to be new”
Regionalist, national & international politics, ambiguity
4 Pulitzer Prizes for Poetry and numerous other honors, incld.
positions at Amherst College & degrees at Oxford &
Cambridge, 1961 John F. Kennedy’s inaguration
Use of vernacular-‘the sound of sense,’ contrast of seriousness
& humor, lightness & gravity
Influences: William James
Ezra Pound 1885-1972
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B. Idaho edu. Pennsylvania
1908 Europe friends w/ Yeats, later promoted Joyce
& Eliot: saw London as New Renaissance capital
Influe: Provencal & early Italian poetry, PreRaphaelites, Cubism, classic Chinese poems
Imagist movement-concrete, economy, free verse
(lyrics)
Post WWI disappointment: critical of unchecked
capitalism, defended fascists
WWII tried for treason- imprisoned, suffered
breakdown and incarcerated at St. Elizabeths
Hospital in DC 1946-58
New writing emerged; once released returned to
T.S. Eliot 1888-1965
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B. St. Louis, edu. Harvard, the Sorbonne, Oxford
1914 met Pound
1917 worked Lloyds Bank, then editor and director
of publishing house
1927 British citizen & member of Anglican Church
Poetry: satiric, allusive, cosmopolitan
Voice of disillusioned generation
Classical, Royalist, Catholic
Literary critic & influential writings
1948 Nobel Prize in Literature and Order of Merit
William Carlos Williams
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Medical student U.Penn-medical career Rutherford,
NJ
Met Pound-avant-garde mvmt NYC, American poetic
sensibility-rhythms of American speech, thought,
experience, & working-class
U.S. multiracial, immigrant, urban violence,
fragmentation
Influences: Joyce, Pound, Gertrude Stein, Kenneth
Burke, & painters: Matisse, Stieglitz, Brueghel
Influenced: Allen Ginsberg, Robert Lowell, Paul
Blackburn
Edna St. Vincent Millay 18921950
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B. Maine parents separated, edu. Barnard C. &
Vassar
Moved to Greenwich Village
Bohemian rebel & free woman
Actor, playwright, prose writer,
Lyrics
1923 Pulitzer Prize
Nervous breakdowns-farm, bad health, retreated
Lyrics: musical, economical lines
Sonnets: compared to Shakespeare & Donne
Dorothy Parker 1893-1967
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B. NJ, father-manufacturer, Jewish, mother-Scottish, died at 5
years old
Edu. Classics, French, politics, social issues
Supported herself after father’s death: Vogue, Vanity Fair, Life,
Saturday Evening Post,
M. Edwin Parker, Wall Street broker & military—after return
1919 problems & drinking
Algonquin (restaurant) Round Table: Robert Benchley, Robert
Sherwood, Alexander Woolcott, Franklin Adams, Harold Ross
Later depression, affair, abortion, suicide
The New Yorker
M. Alan Campbell, L.A., screenwriters
Sarcastic wit, outrageous behavior, heavy drinking
Short-story, poet, critic, screenwriter, playwright
W. H. Auden 1907-1973
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Educated Oxford, teacher
Travelled to Germany often
poet
Marxist sympathizer
1935 married Erika Mann for British passport to escape Nazi
Germany
1946 U.S.A.met Chester Kallman lifelong friend and companion
Change to Christian tone in poetry after mother’s death
1956 prof at Oxford
His work early: engaged, didactic, satiric poems
Later work complex—the urbane, the pastoral, the lyrical, the
erudite, the public, and the introspective
Used traditional patterns with contemporary language.
Theodore Roethke 1908-1963
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Saginaw, MI, father owner greenhouse
Grad. UMich. Taught Literature & creative
writing finally settling in UWash Seattle
Mental illness
Influenced by Auden, Emerson romanticism,
Eng. Ren. Lyricist, Transcendentalists
Autobiographical work, children’s nursery
rhymes & Freud
Poems: short, rhyming
Dylan Thomas 1914-1953
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Swansea, Wales father schoolmaster
Report in South Wales, then to London
Later worked for BBC
Strong literary legacy
Famous for public readings,
Strict in form and rhyme
Nature imagery, idealized childhood in county
Influenced by Romantics
Extensively revised own work
1934 Eighteen Poems, 99 poems in all
Alcoholic
Wislawa Szymborska 1923Polish poet
 Lived in Poland during Nazi occupation, Stalinist
Russia, and Communist Soviet occupation
University of Krakow
 1953 literary journal
 6 collections of poetry
 Nobel Prize 1996 for “for poetry that with ironic
precision allows the historical and biological context
to come to light in fragments of human reality,”
 The value, fragility, and temporality of life; no
absolutes, nothing in life is guaranteed
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X. J. Kennedy 1929
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American poet & children’s writer
Seton Hall, Columbia, UMich., Tufts,
etc.
Literary awards: NEA, Guggenheim,
etc.
Wrote children’s literature first for his
own children, numerous accolades
Poetry: humorous or playful, play with
language, alliteration, metaphor,
John Updike
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fiction, poetry, essays, criticism, a play, children's books, memoirs,
and other prose
Marriage, adultery, family life, and faith, egocentric, existentialism
Small town, middle class, southeastern PA, individual freedom and
social constraints
1932–1950 Shillington PA (Reading) small town to farm
1950–1957 Harvard, Harvard Lampoon, Ruskin School of Drawing
and Fine Art at Oxford, The New Yorker
Early Work, 1958–1965 Ipswich, MA publishing poetry, short stories
The Rabbit Saga, 1960–1990 same character different stages of life
1957–1990 happy town life, travelling, left U.S. during Vietnam,
divorced and remarried small town Mass.
1968–1990 autobiographical work, self-consciousness, finding place
Since 1990 numerous accolades American Award for Fiction, the
Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Pulitzer
Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Howells Medal of
the American Academy of Arts and Letters
Seamus Heaney 1939
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Derry Nothern Ireland, father- Catholic farmer & cattle dealer, 9
children
1951 St. Columb’s College
1957 Queen’s U. in Belfast-lectured in 1965
Death of a Naturalist 1965
1972 full time writer, moved to C. Wicklow, then 1976 to Dublin
1984 appt. Boylston Prof of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard
1989 Prof. of Poetry at Oxford
1995 Nobel Prize
Descriptions of rural life, rustic childhood—Romantics
Coming of age & keeping ancestral values
1970s turbulence in Northern Ireland Catholics & Protestants
1972 Wintering Out, 1975 North, 1979 Field Work
1980s allegorical, return to ancient times & medieval
1990s Seeing Things—parents’ death
1999 Beowulf & translations
Mid to Late 20th century
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Post-Modernism: what comes after modernism-no point in
answering the world, further cynicism, random
Women Writers: Feminist Issues
African American: Civil Rights Issues
Latin American Writers: Civil Rights Issues
Native American: identity issues
Jewish American: Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Bernard Malamud
Metafiction: representations of fiction, storytelling, or art in
general.
Magical Fiction—use of metaphysical devices: John Barth,
Donald Barthelme, and Robert Coover
Postmodern 1960s+
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A reaction to and continuation of modernism
a Rejection of any rational order
Abandons traditional literary forms, often
combining different genres & styles; an
explosion of movements
Nihilism: no reason for values or morality, or
rejection of values: believes in nothing,
cynical, randomness of existence
Playfulness, parody, & irony
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Post-Modernism: what comes after moderism-no
point in answering the world, further cynicism,
random
Women: Susan Glaspell, Charlotte Gilman Perkins
African American:James Baldwin, Toni Cade
Bambara, James McPherson, Ralph Ellison
Native American: Zitkala-Sa, Mourning Dove
John Cheever, Joyce Carol Oates, John Updike
Jewish American: Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Bernard
Malamud
Metafiction: representations of fiction, storytelling,
or art in general.
Magical Fiction—use of metaphysical devices: John
Barth, Donald Barthelme, and Robert Coover
Anne Sexton 1928
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Born Massachusettes wealthy family
Father wool business owner alcoholic, mother well-educated, socialite
Educated New England, eloped at 19 with Alfred Muller Sexton II (divorced 1973)
2 daughter-housewife, followed him from college to naval reserves duty
Returned to Boston, husband worked for her father’s business
Lifelong bouts with depression-institutionalized-couldn’t care for her children for 3 years
Therapist encouraged her to write & attended poetry workshop at Tufts University
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New England housewife turned poet, icon, taboo-breaking
Great Imagery & insight
Mid-century
Technical strength in poetry – reminiscent of Poe & French symbolists
Person and direct poetry, “confessional” poetry,
Student of Robert Lowell, mixes personal subject matter with traditional verse forms
Struggles with depression, suicide, marriage, sex, feminism
Upper-middle class woman frustrated with sole role of wife, mother, homemaker
Won Pulitzer Prize 1967
1970 teaching at Boston U.
Committed suicide 1974
Adrienne Rich 1929
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Born Baltimore, MD: Father doctor, mother pianist-home schooled
Great reader from a young age: Shakespeare, Keats, Ibsen
B.A. Radcliffe College 1951: same year won Yale Younger Poets Award,
published first book of poetry
Early work: conventional forms, meter & rhyme
Imitated Auden, Yeats, Frost, using male voice
Married Alfred H. Conrad, had 3 sons traveled to Europe & kept writing
publishing
1960s-70s: changes more unconventional poetry, more feminist: abandons
form in stanzas and rhyme schemes, more free verse
She and her husband politically involved. NYC: Women’s liberation movement,
writing about women’s history and
Husband committed suicide & she came out as a lesbian
Numersous awards
1980s moved to California with her partner
Won awards and positions including Prof at Stanford U. and more prolific
Sylvia Plath 1932-1963
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Her life and early, tragic death resulted in great controversy about the quality of her writing
Otto Plath, father dominant head of family immigrated from Prussia in 1901, Darwinian. Studied
language, biology, zoology, entomology, PhD Harvard 1928. Died 1940 during an amputation of his leg
due to diabetes.
Aurelia Schober, mother 21 years younger and 2nd wife of Otto, was a high school teacher of languages.
Excelled in school, scholarship to Smith College where she began publishing her work, first at the Smith
Review and then in literary magazines.
Left Smith and edited Mademoiselle magazine in NYC. After this year, she began her life struggles with
depression.
She was given electroconvulsive therapy which was painful and terrified her. Thereafter she made her
first attempt at suicide.
Treated in patient at Massachusetts General Hospital & then McLean Hospital and treated by a Freudian
analyst. Returned to Smith in 1954.
Graduated from Smith in 1955. Started M.A. degree at Cambridge; completed in 1957.
1956 met Ted Hughes, poet, and married later than year. They returned to the U.S.
She taught at Smith and Hughes taught and wrote. After a frustrating year, they gave up teaching to
write full time.
Moved to Boston where the wrote and met with other writers: Frost, Robert Lowell, Marianne Moore,
Adrienne Rich, and Anne Sexton.
1959 travelled across U.S. and then returned to England. A daughter was born in 1961. They
separated the next year b/c Hughes was having an affair. Alone, Plath wrote.
A single, working mother and depressed she struggled with her depression and the English dark, long
winters exacerbated her condition. She committed suicide though first she made sure her children
were taken care.
Sylvia-idealist, driven to self-improvement
First book of poetry The Colossus, novel The Bell Jar
And left behind additional poetry and manuscript
Diana Ackerman 1948
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b. Illinois, PhD Cornell U.
D. Lit Kenyon College, Guggenheim Grant
Taught Cornell
The New Yorker, Smithsonian, National Geographic
Poetry, influenced by Hollywood and John Donne, NASA
Combination of opposites, abstract concepts and vivid images
Scientific
Poet, essayist, naturalist
2 dozen works
A Natural History of the Senses, A Natural History of Love,
One Hundred Names for Love, The Zookeeper’s Wife
African American Literature
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The Harlem Renaissance: 1920s a convergence of black writers and artists in
NYC
W.E. DuBois’ “The Souls of Black Folks” and Booker T. Washington’s “Up from
Slavery”
“A spiritual coming of age of the black race”
Poetry, short stories, plays, research, visual arts,
1925 The New Negro a collection by Alain Locke prof at Howard U.
1926 Nation manifesto by Langston Hughes “The Negro Artist and the Racial
Mountain” the need for racial pride and artistic independence
Langston Hughes, Arna Bontemps, James Weldon Johnson, Nella Larsen,
Countee Cullen, Claude McKay, Jean Toomer, Zora Neale Hurston
Themes of African American experience, using folk literature
Crisis, Opportunity, and the Messenger literary magazines
The Great Depression 1929 lack of resources
The WPA Worker’s Progress A… and members worked for the NY Federal
Writers’ Project
Langston Hughes 1902-1967
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B. Joplin, Missouri, lived in midwest and Mexico, NYC, France, Wash.D.C.
Credited as the first African American to make a living as a writer: poet, drama,
fiction, autobiography, opera, musicals, even children’s books
Grandmother’s 1st husband died at Harper’s Ferry with John Brown, her 2nd husband
was an abolitionist: family history of working for African American rights; lonely
childhood
Attended Columbia U. NYC, left in 1922 worked and travelled: Africa & Paris; back to
U.S. 1924, already a well-known poet.
Influenced by Walt Whitman and Carl Sandburg, Paul Laurence Dunbar
Dedication to black music—uses blues and jazz in his poetry
Decided to write about the African American experience especially lower-class
Harlem Renaissance
Attended historically black Lincoln U. in PA grad. 1929.
There met “Godmother” Mrs. Charlotte Mason a patron
1932 in Soviet Union & was very leftist in politics; moves centrist in WWII
1937 Europe, Madrid during Spanish Civil War
1938 Harlem Suitcase Theater
1953 Senator Joseph McCarthy’s hearing
Infused Afro-American music traditions into his writing: jazz poetry
Racial pride and racial feeling: a radical democrat, love of humanity and sense of the
ideal
Latin American Literature
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Literature from the colonial period mirrored the styles and
conventions of the countries of Spain and Portugal (largely outside of
the European mainstream).
17th century poet So Juana Ines de la Cruz, a Catholic nun who was
silenced by the Monsignor is representative of the limitations on
writers of the colonial period.
19th century-wars of independence: literature reflected issues of
national identity, threat of anarcy and social dissolution.
Jose Joaquin Fernandez de Lizardi of Mexico, Andres Bello of
Venezuela & Chile, Jose Hernandez of Argentina, Joaquim Maria
Macado de Assis of Brazil
Cuban Revolution 1959
A term for the many countries and cultures
Emergence in the 1970s
1980s with stronger immigration—8.9 million immigrants
Immigration and Nationality Act (equal immigration)
38.8 million (identified) Latinos
Not published b/c belief that Latinos are illiterate.
Neo-colonial issues, follows history of wars of independence in early
Jimmy Santiago Baca
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B. 1952, mix of Chicano and Apache
Mother murdered by 2nd husband, father died of alcoholism.
Left an orphanage in New Mexico for street life. Teen years
filled with violence and drugs.
San Quentin prison and Arizon
Writing in Prison “bridged my divided life of prisoner and free
man.”
Published in Mother Jones, editor Denise Levertov was a big
supporter
Writing led to self-discovery and connection with his heritagehealing.
Poetry of witness and clarity of images
Martin Espada
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B. 1957 Brooklyn, parents Puerto Rican
Lawyer Boston
Socially aware, urban poetry
Identity as a Spanish-speaking immigrant in
America
Influenced by Pablo Nerudo
Writing classes at U Maryland, U Wisconsin
BA History, J.D. Northeastern U., U MassAmherst English prof
Asian American Literature
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1960s
Americans of Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Filipino, Indo-Pakistani, and
Vietnamese and other Asian origins lumped together
Individual country, language, culture, history
Dealing with being a hyphenate (-)
National boundaries
Immigration, discrimination, and international relation—war
Exclusion Laws of 1882, 1888, 1892 refused Chinese laborers; unequal
gender ratios, prohibited citizenship or ownership
Philippine-American War (1899-1902), World War II, and the Japanese
occupation of Asian countries, and the internment of Japanese Americans,
Korean War, Vietnam War
Immigration and Nationality Act 1965—allowed quotas of Asian immigrants
=European immigrants
Racism, alienation, culture, history, identity, family, gender relations, loss of
homeland, class, hope/anger with America, longing, neo-colonialism
Li-Young Lee 1957•Parents Chinese, born in Jakarta, Indonesia
•Father was personal physician to Mao Tse-tung; spent a year as a political
prisoner
•Travelled throughout Hong Kong, Macau, and Japan, before arriving in America
in 1964.
•Studied at the U Pittsburgh, the U Arizona, and SUNY Brockport.
•Married two children in Chicago
•Two collections of poetry Rose (Brockport, NY, 1986) and The City in Which I
Love You (Brockport, 1990) award winners
•Critics find fault with his work for its looseness, both emotionally and
linguistically
•Fans like his modesty and unsentimental intimacy with which he handles his
often sensational subject-matter.
Native American Literature
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Between 20 and 100 million people who spoke 300+ different languages 300 distinct cultural
groups lived on the North American continent—and developed its own oral literature containing
ritual drama, song, narrative, and oratory
Shared belief in community and close coexistence of physical and spiritual reality
Europeans and Euro-Americans began writing and preserving the oral traditions of Native
Americans since the early Spanish and French missionaries—and making them “literate”
Late 18th and early 19th century Native Americans seek space and power—survival with the new
United States
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Native Americans begin writing down their own languages and recording their stories
Europeans and Euro-Americans begin ethnographic collections in the 19th century
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Blackhawk (1833), Black Elk Speaks (1932), The Life and Adventures of Joaquin Murieta (1854)
19th c. the first Native American autobiographies and novels
Mid-late 19th c. cultural preservation and instruction
U.S. policy of assimilation-General Allotment Act of 1887—boarding schools for N.A. children
20th century “salvage anthropology Franx Boas
Early 20th c. explosion of Native American writers in many genres—saving their culture
1934 Wheeler-Howard Indian Reorganization Act—reestablished authority of tribal governments
(pre-loss 60%)
House Concurrent Resolution 108 (1953)—termination government relationships with tribes—sent
N.A. off the res.
Native American Renaissance late 20th century
Vine Deloria Jr.'s (Standing Rock Sioux) Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto (1969),
philosophical, religious, political, legal critiques of American society
N. Scott Momaday (Kiowa) House Made of Dawn (1968), 1969 Pulitzer Prize in fiction.
Sherman Alexie
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B. 1966 Spokane Indian reservation
Attended Gonzaga U. & Washington State U.
1995 B.A.
poet, writer, filmaker
Reservation Blues (1996), The Absolutely
True Diary of a Part-time Indian, Films: The
Business of Fancydancing (1992),and The
Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven
(1993) became Smoke Signals. Indian Killer
(1996).