Between Two Fires

Native American storytelling goes back centuries, but the rise of written Native American literature is much more recent. As of 1968, fewer than a dozen novels by Native Americans had been published. After House Made of Dawn won a Pulitzer Prize in 1969, serious critical attention became focused on a Native American author for the first time. Today, American Indian fiction is written largely by "mixed-bloods" who are of both native and European descent, and the central theme of most of this literature is the quest for identity. Discover some of these quests and more in this article, made available by The World & I Online.