"A Study Guide for Sherman Alexie's ""How to Write the Great American Indian Novel"""

By Gale and Cengage

"A Study Guide for Sherman Alexie's ""How to Write the Great American Indian Novel"", excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Poetry for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Poetry for Students for all of your research needs."

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cengage Learning - Gale
• Release date: Dec 13, 2018
• ISBN: 9780028666143

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A Study Guide for Sherman Alexie’s How to Write the Great American Indian Novel

Sherman Alexie

1996

Introduction

A free-verse poem of twenty couplets published in 1996, How to Write the Great American Indian Novel is a satire by Sherman Alexie about the expectations that mainstream—that is, white—American readers might have for a hypothetical great American Indian novel. The poem plays off the well-known conception of the great American novel, a phrase used to refer sometimes to actual works of literature and sometimes to purely hypothetical ones that somehow encapsulate the vast entirety of the American experience with sweeping literary strokes of genius. One novel posited as a great novel is Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), for getting to the heart of the blackwhite relations that determined the course of the nation. Questions of racial perspective are often raised in discussions of potential great American novels.

Alexie, of Spokane and Coeur d'Alene heritage, posits in this poem a great American Indian novel provocatively oriented toward a predominantly white—and ethically reproachable—reading public. Stereotypes abound, forcing readers to reckon with their own potentially narrow conceptions of what to expect from fictional Indian characters as much as from real-life Indian individuals. How to Write the Great American Indian Novel is contained in the section Tourists in Alexie's collection The Summer of Black Widows (1996).

Author Biography

Alexie was born on the Spokane Indian Reservation in Wellpinit, Washington, on October 7, 1966, to a mother of mixed Spokane, Colville, Flathead, and white descent and a Coeur d'Alene father. His mother supported her six children by working at the Wellpinit trading post and selling hand-sewn quilts; his father was not always present with the family. Alexie was born with hydrocephalus—excessive fluid in the cranial cavity—which required surgery when he was six months old and led to his experiencing seizures until he was seven years old.

Alexie's uniqueness complicated socializing, and at a young age he became enamored of literature. He devoted himself to reading nearly every book in the Wellpinit tribal school library and excelled academically. His life was touched