Set between 19 in North Dakota, in the novel Native Americans are fighting both to keep ownership of their land and to remain strong in the face of the consumption (tuberculosis) epidemic. She lives in Minnesota, where she owns a Birchbark Books, an independent store that focuses on Native American culture and community.

For these novels she’s received two National Book Critics Circle Awards, a National Book Award, and a Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction she was also a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize. Erdrich’s novels are complexly interwoven with one another, set primarily on a single reservation and in the surrounding towns. They raised six children together, three of them adopted, until they separated in 1995 and Dorris committed suicide in 1997. She remained in touch with Dorris and they began to collaborate remotely on stories together, winning the Nelson Algren Fiction Prize for a story they would later expand into the novel Love Medicine after marrying in 1981. Two years later, she enrolled in Johns Hopkins University to earn an M.A. At school there, she met her future husband, Michael Dorris, the director of the new Native American Studies program, and began to examine her own ancestry. Erdrich was in the first class of women admitted to Dartmouth, where she earned an English degree in 1976.

Erdrich’s grandfather was a tribal chairman for the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians. Erdrich was the oldest of seven children born to a German American father and Chippewa mother, who both taught at a boarding school set up by the Bureau of Indian Affairs in North Dakota.

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