D'Arcy McNickle

As The Surrounded opens, Archilde León has just returned from the big city to his father's ranch on the Flathead Indian Reservation in Montana. The story that unfolds captures the intense and varied conflict that already characterized reservation life in 1936, when this remarkable novel was first published. Educated at a federal Indian boarding school, Archilde is torn not only between white and Indian cultures but also between love for his Spanish father and his Indian mother, who in her old age is rejecting white culture and religion to return to the ways of her people. Archilde's young contemporaries, meanwhile, are succumbing to the destructive influence of reservation life, growing increasingly uprooted, dissolute, and hopeless. Although Archilde plans to leave the reservation after a brief visit, his entanglements delay his departure until he faces destruction by the white man's law. In an early review of The Surrounded, Oliver La Farge praised it as "simple, clear, direct, devoid of affectations, and fast-moving." He included it in his "small list of creditable modern novels using the first Americans as theme." Several decades later, long out of print but not forgotten, The Surrounded is still considered one of the best works of fiction by or about Native Americans.

Story of the Little Elk people, a fictional Northwestern Indian tribe, seen through the eyes of Antoine, grandson of the tribal leader.

"Considering the 1936 publication date of The Surrounded, McNickle certainly belongs to that group of early Native American novelists comprised of Mourning Dove, John Joseph Mathews, John Milton Oskison, and others, but the book was followed by thirty years of silence and only with the publication of N. Scott Momaday's House Made of Dawn in 1968 did Native American literature gain momentum once more. The canon has grown rapidly ever since, and a number of Native American writers have become an integral part of it. Unfortunately, the richness of contemporary writings has pushed earlier novels by Native American writers into the background and, frequently, are read only for their historic interest." "McNickle does not fit comfortably into this early group of Native American writers though, as his non-assimilationist plot, writing style, and technique set The Surrounded apart from novels such as Co-ge-we-a (1927) and Sundown (1934). A look at "The Hungry Generations," an earlier, handwritten manuscript version of The Surrounded in the McNickle Papers at the Newberry Library, shows clearly what a triumph The Surrounded really was. D'Arcy McNickle's The Hungry Generations is an important addition for those readers interested in McNickle and Montana and cultural history, as well as those interested in early Native American literature."--BOOK JACKET

A story of pre-Hispanic Indian life in the area which is now the American Southwest.