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Biography
American

Leslie Marmon Silko

1948

Leslie Marmon Silko is a Laguna Pueblo novelist, poet, and essayist whose work is central to the Native American Renaissance in literature. Ceremony (1977) — about a World War II veteran returning to the Laguna Pueblo reservation — is one of the most important American novels of the twentieth century. Her epic novel Almanac of the Dead (1991) is the most ambitious attempt to tell the history of the Americas from an indigenous perspective.

Past sales0
PeriodContemporary
NationalityAmerican
1. Biography

A short life of the author

Leslie Marmon Silko (b. 5 March 1948) was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and grew up on the Laguna Pueblo reservation. She is of Laguna Pueblo, Mexican, and white descent. She studied at the University of New Mexico and received a MacArthur Fellowship in 1981.

Life and Career

Ceremony (1977) is one of the defining novels of the Native American Renaissance — the literary movement that also includes N. Scott Momaday, James Welch, and Louise Erdrich. The novel follows Tayo, a mixed-race Laguna Pueblo veteran of World War II, as he struggles with PTSD and seeks healing through traditional ceremony. The novel’s structure — interweaving prose narrative with verse passages drawn from Laguna oral tradition — embodies its argument that storytelling itself is a form of healing.

Storyteller (1981) — a mixed-genre collection of stories, poems, and photographs — explores the relationship between oral tradition and written literature. Almanac of the Dead (1991) — a massive, polyphonic novel spanning five hundred years of the Americas — is her most ambitious and controversial work: a prophetic vision of indigenous resistance to European colonisation.

Major Works and Themes

Silko writes about the relationship between land, story, and identity in Laguna Pueblo culture. Her fiction insists that stories are not entertainment or art objects but are essential to survival — that the continuity of a people depends on the continuity of their stories. Her work is deeply political, addressing the dispossession, environmental destruction, and cultural erasure that have marked the indigenous experience in the Americas.

Key Works

  • Ceremony (1977)
  • Storyteller (1981)
  • Almanac of the Dead (1991)
  • Gardens in the Dunes (1999)

Collecting Silko

Ceremony (1977, Viking) — the debut — brings $100–$400. Almanac of the Dead (1991, Simon & Schuster) brings $30–$80. Silko signs at events and readings. Viking first editions of Ceremony are the most sought-after.