Sherman Alexie Rates Favorites at The Atlantic

What's the poem that made Sherman Alexie "want to drop everything?" The Atlantic sure would like to know. Alexie speaks with Joe Fassler and tells all:

[...] For Alexie, a Spokane/Coeur d'Alene Indian who grew up destitute, literary dreams were more than beyond reach—it never occurred to him that a reservation Indian could speak out and be heard. A chance encounter with a poem by Adrian C. Louis gave Alexie the life-altering license to sit down, put pen to paper, and write out all he knew.

Lone Ranger’s initial reception was sensational—the book won the Pen/Hemingway Award for best first fiction, and the Chicago Tribune likened its publication to the culture-shattering arrival of Richard Wright’s Native Son. Now a celebratory 20th-anniversary edition, issued this fall by Grove Press, makes it clear why the collection has become a cherished classic. Alexie’s steely portrait of reservation life centers on Victor, a hard-drinking, listless former basketball star haunted by two missed free throws that cost his team a championship. His friend and tagalong is Thomas-Builds-the-Fire, a long-winded would-be bard whose cryptic parables elicit groans and put-downs, and who eventually falls silent. In its balance of plaintive lyricism and pained, wry humor, Lone Ranger remains a timeless examination of the many chains that bind each human person, and the stories we tell to survive.

Alexie spoke to me by phone. After our conversation, I scoured the internet for versions of Adrian's poem, but could only find isolated quotations in scholarly papers. I reached out to the poet, who graciously sent a copy of the poem for us to republish. At the bottom of this post is Louis's "Elegy for the Forgotten Oldsmobile," appearing online in full for the first time. [...]

Read their conversation in its entirety at The Atlantic.