William Joseph Thomas

Introduction: A growing area of research and study, literature by Native American women writers has proliferated in the last thirty years. Zitkala-Sa, Mourning Dove, and other women writers of the turn of the last century have also been studied more since the “Native American Renaissance” sparked by N. Scott Momaday’s 1969 novel House Made of Dawn and its winning of the Pulitzer Prize. Particularly noted names among recent writers include Leslie Marmon Silko, a Laguna Pueblo novelist and poet, and Paula Gunn Allen, a Laguna-Lebanese-Lakota poet and critic. The recent rebirth is not limited only a few representative female voices; there are many women writers who deserve such study and are accorded places in anthologies and critical reception. This pathfinder is aimed at a university audience, and is arranged from most general to most specific.

There are several parts of this resource:

Printed Introductory Sources will allow readers to gain a basic insight into Native American literature, seeing a context for some of these writers and learning biographical facts about their lives;

Selected Anthologies will include samples of the most well-known poems by these women writers, and help situate them among the growing body of Native American literature that’s being currently studied;

Selected Electronic Resources should point to current information on the writings, lives, and critical study of Native American literature in general and the six selected writers in particular;

Six Individual Writers: these pages will provide a short biographical sketch and bibliography of the following writers: Paula Gunn Allen, Louise Erdrich, Joy Harjo, Linda Hogan, Leslie Silko, and Luci Tapahonso. These six women were chosen because of their prominence in the field; and

Critical Studies contains selected volumes of the most famous resources and critics (including Arnold Krupat, Paula Gunn Allen, and Kenneth Lincoln, among others) and new directions that literary critics seem to be following for Native American literature.

The resources in this web page include some of the most-used texts, most-cited authors, and texts intended to show the breadth of coverage; the list cannot be exhaustive.

For further browsing, search your library catalogs for the Library of Congress Subject Headings:

American literature—Indian authors

Indian women—Literary collections

American literature—Women authors

American literature—20^th century Indians—Literary collections.

And you may browse the literature collection on the seventh floor of Davis, where the majority of these works are held.

Page updated 05 May 2002