It’s the birthday of novelist and poet Louise Erdrich (b. 1954), best known for her fiction about the Ojibwe Indians.

Erdrich herself is one-quarter Ojibwe through her mother; her father was German-American. Erdrich was born in Little Falls, Minnesota, but grew up in Wahpeton, North Dakota. She was a member of the first class of women to be admitted to Dartmouth College, where she met her future husband, Michael Dorris, who was chairing the new Native-American studies department. Dorris himself was part Modoc Indian. After getting her master’s from Johns Hopkins University, Erdrich became writer-in-residence back at Dartmouth, where she and Dorris began collaborating on writing. They wrote an award-winning story, “The Greatest Fisherman in the World,” and expanded it into Erdrich’s first novel, Love Medicine (1984), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award. By then they were married.

Erdrich went on to write seven more novels about three families living on or near the same reservation in North Dakota: The Beet Queen (1986), Tracks (1988), The Bingo Palace (1994), Tales of Burning Love  (1997), The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse (2001), Four Souls (2004), and The Painted Drum (2005). She’s written at least 10 other novels as well, including The Crown of Columbus (1991), the only novel that she and Dorris fully collaborated on. Erdrich’s The Round House won the National Book Award for Fiction in 2012, and her novel LaRose won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2017.

Meanwhile, Erdrich and Dorris had six children, three adopted by Dorris before their marriage, and three biological. Dorris himself won a National Book Award in 1989 for The Broken Cord, a memoir about his oldest son’s fetal alcohol syndrome. In 1997, Dorris came under investigation for sexual abuse; three of the couple’s daughters made allegations. Dorris committed suicide in April of that year.

Erdrich is also a critically acclaimed poet; her latest book of poems is Original Fire: Selected and New Poems (2004). The novel LaRose is about a man who accidentally kills his best friend’s child in a hunting accident; he decides to follow an ancient Ojibwe means of recompense and give his own son, a five-year-old named LaRose, to the bereaved parents.

Have a much more cheerful Thursday than the tone of this post and stay scrupulously honest to the data.