Sherman Alexie

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Sherman Alexie bigraphy, stories - Native American author and filmmaker

Sherman Alexie : biography

October 7, 1966 –

Sherman Joseph Alexie, Jr. (born October 7, 1966) is a poet, writer, and filmmaker. Much of his writing draws on his experiences as a Native American growing up on the Spokane Indian Reservation. He currently lives in Seattle, Washington., Eric Konigsberg, The New York Times, October 20, 2009.

Some of his best known works are The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven (1993), a book of short stories, and Smoke Signals (1998), a film of his screenplay based on The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven.

His first novel, Reservation Blues, received one of the fifteen 1996 American Book Awards. His first young adult novel, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, is a semi-autobiographical novel that won the 2007 U.S. National Book Award for Young People’s Literature and the Odyssey Award as best 2008 audiobook for young people (read by Alexie himself). His collection of short stories and poems, entitled War Dances, won the 2010 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction.

Life

Childhood

Sherman Alexie was born on October 7, 1966 on the Spokane Indian Reservation in Wellpinit, Washington, where he spent his childhood. His great-grandfather was of Russian descent. His father, Sherman Joseph Alexie, was of Coeur d’Alene descent and his mother, Lillian Agnes Cox, of Colville, Flathead, Spokane and Euroamerican descent. He was born with hydrocephalus, a condition that occurs when there is an abnormally large amount of cerebral fluid in the cranial cavity. Due to the hydrocephalus, Alexie underwent brain surgery when he was six months old. It was a surgery that he was not expected to survive, and if he did only with permanent mental disabilities. However, Alexie’s surgery was successful and he survived with no damage to his mental faculties.

His father was an alcoholic who often left the house for days at a time. To support her six children, Alexie’s mother, Lillian, sewed quilts and worked as a clerk at the Wellpinit Trading Post.

Alexie has described his life at the reservation school as challenging because he was constantly teased by other kids on the reservation. He recalls being nicknamed "The Globe" because he had a large head due to the hydrocephalus. Until the age of seven, Alexie suffered from seizures and bedwetting and had to take strong drugs to control them. He was excluded from many of the activities that are rites of passage for young Indian males because of his health problems. Despite this difficult upbringing, Alexie excelled academically, reading everything available to him, including auto repair manuals.

Education

In order to better his education, Alexie made the decision to leave the reservation and attend Reardan High School in Reardan. The school was thirty miles off the reservation and Alexie was the only student of Native heritage among mostly white students. He excelled at school and became a star player on the basketball team, which was coincidentally called the Reardan High Indians. Along with the basketball team, Alexie was also class president and a member of the debate team.

His successes in high school won him a scholarship in 1985 to Gonzaga University, a Roman Catholic school in Spokane. Originally Alexie enrolled in the pre-med program at Gonzaga with hopes of becoming a doctor. However, he became squeamish in his anatomy classes. After an unsuccessful try at medicine, Alexie switched to law, but that didn’t work out either. The pressure of succeeding in college became too much for Alexie, and he began drinking heavily to cope. Though he was not happy with his choice of career path, Alexie found comfort in literature classes. In 1987 he dropped out of Gonzaga University and enrolled at Washington State University (WSU).

At Washington State, Alexie enrolled in a creative writing course taught by Alex Kuo, a respected poet of Chinese American background. Alexie was at a low point in his life and Kuo served as a mentor to him. Kuo gave Alexie an anthology entitled Songs of This Earth on Turtle’s Back by Joseph Bruchac, which is a book that changed his life; he said that it taught him "how to connect to non-Native literature in a new way." He was inspired from reading works of poetry that were written by other Native Americans. With his new appreciation of poetry, Alexie started work on his first collection, The Business of Fancydancing: Stories and Poems, which was published in 1992 through Hanging Loose Press. With the success of his first published work of poetry, Alexie stopped drinking and quit school just three credits short of a degree. In 1995 he was awarded a bachelor’s degree from Washington State University.