Caboodles Book Club in a Bag
Author Biography
Master Butcher’s Singing Club
by Louise Erdrich
Pima County Public Library
http://www.library.pima.gov/books/caboodles/
1954-
Also known as: Karen Louise Erdrich, Milou North, Heidi Louise, Louise Erdrich
Birth: July 6, 1954 in Little Falls, Minnesota
Occupation: Writer
Source: Contemporary Authors Online, Thomson Gale, 2006.
Entry updated: 03/03/2006
Sidelights
The daughter of a Chippewa Indian mother and a German-American father, Louise Erdrich explores
Native-American themes in her works, with major characters representing both sides of her heritage. In
an award-winning series of related novels and short stories, Erdrich has visited and re-visited the North
Dakota lands where her ancestors met and mingled, creating “a Chippewa experience in the context of
the European American novelistic tradition,” to quote P. Jane Hafen in the Dictionary of Literary Biog-
raphy. Many critics claim Erdrich has remained true to her Native ancestors’ mythic and artistic visions
while writing fiction that candidly explores the cultural issues facing modern-day Native Americans and
mixed heritage Americans. As an essayist for Contemporary Novelists observed: “Erdrich’s accomplish-
ment is that she is weaving a body of work that goes beyond portraying contemporary Native American
life as descendants of a politically dominated people to explore the great universal questions--questions
of identity, pattern versus randomness, and the meaning of life itself.” In fact, as Hafen put it, Erdrich’s
“diverse imageries, subjects, and textual strategies reaffirm imperatives of American Indian survival.”
A contributor to Contemporary Popular Writers credited Erdrich with a body of work that is “more inter-
ested in love and survival than in recrimination.” The critic added: “Past wrongs and present hardships
do figure in her work but chiefly as the backdrop against which the task of ‘protecting and celebrating’
takes on added force and urgency.... Erdrich’s sense of loss never giv