Document Type
Book
Publication Date
2005
Abstract
“'I prefer infinitions to definitions,’” Alex Yazzie, the cross-dressing Navajo anthropologist in Louis Owens’ Bone Game, declares (46). So did Louis Owens. In his life, in his death, and above all in his writing, Louis Owens (1948-2002), novelist, essayist, literary and cultural critic, crossed boundaries and refused definitions. Born in Lompoc, California, Owens came to understand the arid landscape of the west through the lens of his early childhood in the Yazoo bottoms of Mississippi. He was a Native mixedblood who acknowledged not only his multi-tribal heritage, Choctaw on his father's side and Cherokee on his mother’s, but the Irish heritage his parents shared. He was an academic with a fund of practical knowledge, from auto mechanics to woodworking, as much at home fighting wildfires as conducting research in a library archive. The man who was named Crosscut Saw Champion of the Prescott National Forest in 1977 received the American Book Award twenty years later.
Recommended Citation
Helstern, Linda Lizut. Louis Ownes. Boise, ID: Boise State University, 2005. Digital. Western Writers Series, 168.