A short life of the author
Ian Frazier (b. 26 December 1951) was born in Cleveland, Ohio, and attended Harvard University, where he wrote for the Harvard Lampoon. He joined The New Yorker in 1974 and has been a staff writer and contributor for five decades, publishing humorous pieces, reporting, and long-form nonfiction.
Life and Career
Dating Your Mom (1986), his first book, collected humorous pieces from The New Yorker. But Great Plains (1989) — the book that made his reputation — was something entirely different: part travelogue (Frazier driving across the Plains in his van), part history (Crazy Horse, Sitting Bull, Bonnie and Clyde, the dust bowl, the missile silos), part meditation on what it means that the vast centre of the American continent is being depopulated. The book’s method — combining deep historical research with comic observation of the present, moving freely between a Sioux battle site and a prairie dog town and a missile silo and a motel — created a form that has no real precedent in American nonfiction.
Family (1994) traced his own family’s migration across American generations — from Connecticut to Ohio to points west — as a way of narrating the larger story of white American settlement. On the Rez (2000), about time spent on the Oglala Sioux Pine Ridge Reservation, was his most politically engaged book: a sustained engagement with poverty, alcoholism, and the legacy of colonisation on the Pine Ridge. Travels in Siberia (2010) — about five trips to Russia’s vast interior — brought his method to a new landscape.
His humorous pieces for The New Yorker — including the classic “Laws Concerning Food and Drink; Household Principles; Lamentations of the Father” — are among the finest in the magazine’s tradition of literary humour.
Themes and Style
Frazier writes about places most Americans drive past or fly over — the Great Plains, the reservations, the small towns, the vast interior. His method combines exhaustive historical research with the wandering eye of a comic essayist, producing nonfiction that reads like no one else. His humour is deadpan and cumulative: he presents absurd facts (the dimensions of a prairie dog tunnel, the number of nuclear warheads beneath the Nebraska grassland) without comment, letting the reader experience the comedy of scale.
Critical Standing
Frazier is one of the most distinctive nonfiction writers in America, though his work occupies a space between genres — too funny for serious journalism, too researched for humour writing — that makes him difficult to categorise and easy to underrate.
Key Works
- Great Plains (1989)
- On the Rez (2000)
- Travels in Siberia (2010)
Collecting Frazier
Great Plains (1989, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York) first editions bring $20–$50. On the Rez (2000, FSG) brings $10–$30. All titles are readily available.