Melissa Naase 
Key Aspects in Sherman Alexie’s Works with Special Reference to his Life 

Seminar paper from the year 2012 in the subject Didactics for the subject English – Literature, Works, grade: 1, 7, University of Paderborn (Anglistik und Amerikanistik), course: Native American Literature, language: English, abstract: American Indian literature grew out of an oral tradition passed on from one generation to the next. By the late eighteenth century these oral accounts of Indians’ stories were being recorded or translated by interested white people. At this time Indians were also beginning to write down their own stories in the English language. By the twentieth century creativity in the English language became a well-established form of their literary communication. During the same time the works of American Indian authors got a more individualistic tone. One of those individualist is the Native American Sherman Alexie.
Sherman Alexie was born on October 7, 1966. Alexie grew up in the Spokane Indian Reservation in Wahshington.
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Nowadays Alexie lives in Seattle, Washington together with his Native American wife and his two sons. He is a famous Native American poet, autohor, screenwriter and filmmaker.He sold milliions of copies of his books and won several awards for his noves like the “Boston-Globe-Horn Book Award” for the best fiction novel of 2008 in young adult literature or the “National Book Award for Young Peoples’ Literature” in 2007 both for his novel “The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian”. His literature is very important for Native American literature courses in the United States and in the world. Alexie is also read in colleges and universities all across the USA.

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As a Native American himself, his novels, films, and collections of short stories deal with a variety of topics he experienced in the reservation like alcoholism, poverty, stereotypes, friends, death or family problems. Having grown up in the 60’s und 70’s in the reservation Alexie has made lots of experiences on many, if not all topics he writes about.
For this paper I mainly had a look at three of Alexie’s works, namely the novels “Reservation Blues” and “The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian” as well as his collection of short stories “The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven”. Reading these novels and stories I realized that they have much in common. In all those works the same problems can be found as well as the characters reappear. (…)