Sherman Alexie

Sherman J. Alexie Jr. (b. 1966), a member of the Spokane and the Coeur d’Alene tribes, grew up on the Spokane Reservation in Washington state. A graduate of Washington State University, he has published more than twenty books, most notably The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven (1993), The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (2007), and War Dances (2009), which won the PEN/Faulkner Award for best American fiction. One of the stories in the Lone Ranger collection was the basis for the movie Smoke Signals (1999), for which Alexie wrote the screenplay. An activist for Native American rights and culture, Alexie wrote the following essay describing the impact of reading on his life. It was originally published in the Los Angeles Times in 1998 for a series called “The Joy of Reading and Writing.”

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