Author of the week

Louise Erdrich

Even the best writers can fail to see a great story hiding in plain sight, said Laurie Hertzel in the Minneapolis Star Tribune. Before starting her latest novel, National Book Award winner Louise Erdrich wondered, at 64, whether she had already written her last. But in 2018, her grandfather was posthumously inducted into a Native American hall of honor, and she reread his letters. Patrick Gourneau had been chairman of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa in the 1950s when Congress was considering “emancipating” Indians by abolishing tribes and moving them from their reservations. Erdrich had a passion for studying Native history, but only when she reviewed her grandfather’s letters did she realize how much he’d done to preserve tribal sovereignty. “All of a sudden,” she says, “it was, ‘Ah, I’d been working on this book all along.’”

The title character in The Night Watchman is based on Gourneau, who worked overnights while building an anti-emancipation campaign by day. But it’s a loose portrait. “I tried as much as possible to fictionalize him,” Erdrich says. She felt less free to do the same to Gourneau’s main foe, U.S. Sen. Arthur Watkins of Utah, said Elizabeth Winkler in The Wall Street Journal. Nearly every word Watkins speaks in the novel is thus taken from the Congressional Record. And Erdrich also took pains to understand his thinking. Her grandfather had set a good example: When Gourneau testified against Watkins’ bill in Washington, he stopped by the senator’s office to thank him for listening. “He tried very hard to meet people on a human level,” Erdrich says. “He was extraordinary that way.”