Sherman Joseph Alexie (he is also called Junior, like the boy in his novel) was born on October 7th 1966 in the Sacred Heart Hospital in Spokane, Washington, and spend his childhood on the Spokane Indian Reservation, which is located in the west of Spokane.
Alexie was born with hydrocephalus, which means that there was too much celebral fluid in the cranial cavity (in his brain), so he was not expected to survive. However, his surgery was successful and he survived. He did not have any mental damages, like expected, but there were other effects, e.g. seizures. He was nicknamed “The Globe” because his head was larger than the others. This was also an effect from which he had to suffer. At the age of seven he had to take strong drugs to control his seizures and bed-wetting. Because of his health problems, he was excluded from many of the activities that young Indian males normally do.
Sherman Alexie has five siblings. His father is also called Sherman Joseph Alexie, and he was a member of the Coeur d’Alene tribe, which is an Indian tribe. He was an alcoholic who often left the house for days at a time. To support her six children, Alexie’s mother Lillian Agnes Cox, who was of Colville, Choctaw, Spokane and European American ancestry, sewed quilts and worked as a clerk at the Wellpinit Trading Post. One of his paternal great-grandfathers was of Russian descent.
Sherman Alexie decided to leave the reservation and attend Reardan high school which was twenty-two miles off the reservation. He was the only Native American student. After a few months he became a star player on the basketball team, he was also elected as class president and participated as a member of the debate team.
1985 graduated from Reardan High. He won a scholarship in 1985 to Gonzaga University, a Roman Catholic university in Spokane, because of his success in high school. He hoped to become a doctor, but he found out that he was squeamish during dissection in his anatomy classes. Because of the enormous pressure to succeed he felt in college he began drinking heavily to cope with his anxiety.
Sherman Alexie was unhappy with the law so after a time he found comfort in literature classes. He planned to be a doctor, but he realized soon that he wanted to do something different. He started at a poetry workshop and this made him want to try to be a writer. He was at a low point in his life, and Kuo (a respected poet of Chinese-American background) served as a mentor to him. The book “Songs of this earth on turtle´s back“ changed his life. He started work on what was published as his first collection “The business of fancy-dancing: stories and Viviane poems“. It was published 1992 and because of that success he stopped drinking. In 1995 he was awarded a bachelor´s degree from Washington State University.
In 2005, Sherman Alexie became a founding board member of Longhouse Media, a non-profit organization that is committed to teaching filmmaking skills to Native American youth, and to using media for cultural expression and social change. He is married to Diane Tomhave, who is of Hidatsa, Ho-Chunk and Potawatomi heritage. They live in Seattle with their two sons.
Your text about the author of the novel is very great. It is easy to understand and there isn’t to much information I think, it ist just the most important information so the text is not to long and you are motivatedt to read it. 🙂