Authors Like Louise Erdrich

William Faulkner

American · The Sound and the Fury (1929), As I Lay Dying (1930)

Faulkner set most of his fiction in Yoknapatawpha County, an imagined corner of Mississippi, where the same families recur across novels and decades. As I Lay Dying is told in fifty-nine short sections by fifteen narrators. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1949.

Every book by William Faulkner →

Gabriel García Márquez

Colombian · One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), Love in the Time of Cholera (1985)

García Márquez was born in Aracataca, Colombia, in 1927 and worked as a journalist before One Hundred Years of Solitude, which follows seven generations of the Buendía family in the invented town of Macondo. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1982 and died in Mexico City in 2014.

N. Scott Momaday

Kiowa · House Made of Dawn (1968), The Way to Rainy Mountain (1969)

Momaday was born in Lawton, Oklahoma, in 1934. House Made of Dawn, about Abel, a young man who returns from the Second World War to his pueblo in New Mexico, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1969, the first by a Native American writer, and opened what critics called the Native American Renaissance. He died in 2024.

Leslie Marmon Silko

Laguna Pueblo · Ceremony (1977), Almanac of the Dead (1991)

Silko was born in Albuquerque in 1948 and grew up at Laguna Pueblo. Ceremony follows Tayo, a Laguna veteran of the Second World War, as traditional ceremony helps him recover. In a review of The Beet Queen she criticised Erdrich for putting postmodern technique ahead of the political struggles of Native people.

James Welch

Blackfeet and A’aninin · Winter in the Blood (1974), Fools Crow (1986)

Welch was born in Browning, Montana, in 1940. Winter in the Blood follows an unnamed young man drifting between his family’s ranch and the bars of northern Montana. Fools Crow, set among the Pikuni Blackfeet around 1870, ends with the Marias Massacre; it won the American Book Award. He died in 2003.

Joy Harjo

Muscogee · In Mad Love and War (1990), Crazy Brave (2012)

Harjo was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1951 and is a poet, memoirist and saxophonist. She served three terms as Poet Laureate of the United States, from 2019 to 2022, the first Native American to hold the post. Crazy Brave is a memoir of her childhood, a violent stepfather and how she became a poet.

Richard Wagamese

Canadian, Ojibwe · Indian Horse (2012), Medicine Walk (2014)

Wagamese was born in Minaki, Ontario, in 1955, a member of the Wabaseemoong Independent Nations. Indian Horse follows Saul Indian Horse, a gifted young hockey player who survives a residential school; it was filmed in 2017. Medicine Walk follows a teenage boy taking his dying father into the backcountry to be buried. Wagamese died in 2017.

Tommy Orange

Cheyenne and Arapaho · There There (2018), Wandering Stars (2024)

Orange was born in Oakland, California, in 1982. There There follows twelve Native characters converging on a powwow at the Oakland Coliseum; it was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Wandering Stars begins with a survivor of the Sand Creek Massacre of 1864 and follows his descendants to the present day.

Angeline Boulley

Ojibwe (Sault Tribe) · Firekeeper’s Daughter (2021), Warrior Girl Unearthed (2023)

Boulley is an enrolled member of the Sault Tribe of Chippewa Indians and grew up in Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan. Firekeeper’s Daughter, about an eighteen-year-old Ojibwe woman who becomes an informant in an FBI investigation after witnessing a murder, won the Michael L. Printz Award and an Edgar Award. Her third novel, Sisters in the Wind, appeared in 2025.

Willa Cather

American · O Pioneers! (1913), My Ántonia (1918)

Cather was born in Virginia in 1873 and moved to Nebraska at nine, where she grew up among Czech, Swedish and German immigrant farmers. My Ántonia follows a Bohemian girl through the hardships of prairie homesteading. Cather won the Pulitzer Prize in 1923 for One of Ours.

Every book by Willa Cather →