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Photographs - Collections - 951-1000 - #00931

Title: North Dakota Authors

Dates: 1970-1996

Collection Number: 00931

Quantity: 16 items

Abstract: Photographs used in exhibit on North Dakota authors or taken during the opening of the Language of the Land: Journey into Literary North Dakota exhibit and presentations at the ND Heritage Center.

Provenance: Images were solicited from authors, copied from books or taken from government series such as the North Dakota Department of Transportation photo files to create a collection of images of North Dakota authors. Some were used in the North Dakota Authors exhibit; some were taken during the opening of the Language of the Land: Journey into Literary North Dakota presentation at the ND Heritage Center. The "Language of the Land" traveling exhibition was seen at the North Dakota Heritage Center in Bismarck from Feb. 4 to March 27, 1994. It was sponsored by the North Dakota Center for the Book and the State Historical Society of North Dakota. Using funds from the Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Fund and additional funding from the North Dakota Humanities Council, the North Dakota Community Foundation and Maxwell's Books, the sponsors presented weekly lectures by North Dakota authors. The speakers were Kathie Ryckman Anderson, Larry Woiwode, David Solheim, Larry Watson, Louise Erdrich, Lois Phillips Hudson, Kathleen Norris and Richard Critchfield. Each lecture was taped for broadcast on both radio and television, and interviews with the authors were aired on Prairie Public Radio and community access television. A state literary map depicting 10 North Dakota writers and listing more than 100 writers who have either lived in North Dakota or written about the state was compiled and made available. A bibliography of North Dakota authors was also compiled and made available.

Property Rights: The State Historical Society of North Dakota owns the property rights to this collection.
               
Copyrights: Copyrights to materials in this collection remain with the donor, publisher, author, or author's heirs.  Researchers should consult the 1976 Copyright Act, Public Law 94-553, Title 17, U.S. Code and an archivist at this repository if clarification of copyright requirements is needed.
               
Access: This collection is open under the rules and regulations of the State Historical Society of North Dakota.
               
Citation: Researchers are requested to cite the collection title, collection number, and the State Historical Society of North Dakota in all footnote and bibliographic references.

Related Collections:       
016.809 H795t Language of the Land: Journey into Literary
10547.0008.069 Language of the Land: Journey into Literary North Dakota presentation at the ND Heritage Center
11023 Author Series Audio recording
32179 Author Series Video

Biographical Sketch:

Louise Erdrich (born Karen Louise Erdrich, June 7, 1954) is an American author, writer of novels, poetry, and children's books featuring Native American characters and settings. She is an enrolled member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians, a federally recognized tribe of the Anishinaabe (also known as Ojibwe and Chippewa). Erdrich is widely acclaimed as one of the most significant writers of the second wave of the Native American Renaissance. In 2009, her novel The Plague of Doves was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and received an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award. In November 2012, she received the National Book Award for Fiction for her novel The Round House. She was awarded the Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction at the National Book Festival in September 2015. She was married to author Michael Dorris and the two collaborated on a number of works. She is also the owner of Birchbark Books, a small independent bookstore in Minneapolis that focuses on Native American literature and the Native community in the Twin Cities. Erdrich was born on June 7, 1954, in Little Falls, Minnesota. She was the oldest of seven children born to Ralph Erdrich, a German-American, and Rita (née Gourneau), a Chippewa woman (of half Ojibwe and half French blood). Both parents taught at a boarding school in Wahpeton, North Dakota, set up by the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Erdrich's maternal grandfather, Patrick Gourneau, served as tribal chairman for the federally recognized tribe of Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians for many years. While Erdrich was a child, her father paid her a nickel for every story she wrote. Her sister Heidi became a poet and also lives in Minnesota; she publishes under the name Heid E. Erdrich. Another sister, Lise Erdrich, has written children's books and collections of fiction and essays.

Erdrich attended Dartmouth College from 1972 to 1976. She was a part of the first class of women admitted to the college and earned an A.B. in English. During her first year, Erdrich met Michael Dorris, an anthropologist, writer, and then-director of the new Native American Studies program. While attending Dorris' class, she began to look into her own ancestry, which inspired her to draw from it for her literary work, such as poems, short stories, and novels.
In 1978, Erdrich enrolled in a Master of Arts program at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. She earned the Master of Arts in the Writing Seminars in 1979. Erdrich later published some of the poems and stories she wrote while in the M.A. program. She returned to Dartmouth as a writer-in-residence. Erdrich remained in contact with Dorris. He attended one of her poetry readings, became impressed with her work, and developed an interest in working with Erdrich. Although Erdrich and Dorris were on two different sides of the world, Erdrich in Boston and Dorris in New Zealand for field research, the two began to collaborate on short stories. Their collaborative story, "The World's Greatest Fisherman", won $5,000 in the Nelson Algren fiction competition. Erdrich and Dorris expanded the story into the novel Love Medicine (1984), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction.

Around the same time, Dorris returned from New Zealand. The pair's literary partnership led them to a romantic relationship. They married in 1981, and raised three adopted children and three biological children together. They separated in 1995, and Dorris committed suicide in 1997. When asked in an interview if writing is a lonely life for her, Erdrich replied, "Strangely, I think it is. I am surrounded by an abundance of family and friends and yet I am alone with the writing. And that is perfect." Erdrich lives in Minneapolis. In 1979 she wrote "The World's Greatest Fisherman", a short story about June Kashpaw, a divorced Ojibwe woman whose death by hypothermia brought her relatives home to a fictional North Dakota reservation for her funeral. It won the Nelson Algren Short Fiction prize and eventually became the first chapter of her debut novel, Love Medicine, published by Holt, Rinehart, and Winston in 1984.

Love Medicine won the 1984 National Book Critics Circle Award. It has also been featured on the National Advanced Placement Test for Literature. During the publication of Love Medicine, Erdrich produced her first collection of poems, Jacklight (1984), which highlights the struggles between Native and non-Native cultures, as well as celebrating family, ties of kinship, autobiographical meditations, monologues, and love poetry. She incorporates elements of Ojibwe myths and legends. Erdrich continued to write poems, which have been included in her collections. She is best known as a novelist, and has published a dozen award-winning and best-selling novels. Erdrich followed Love Medicine with The Beet Queen (1986), which continued her technique of using multiple narrators and expanded the fictional reservation universe of Love Medicine to include the nearby town of Argus, North Dakota. The action of the novel takes place mostly before World War II. Leslie Marmon Silko accused Erdrich's The Beet Queen of being more concerned with postmodern technique than with the political struggles of Native peoples. Tracks (1988) goes back to the early 20th century at the formation of the reservation. It introduces the trickster figure of Nanapush, who owes a clear debt to Ojibwe figure Nanabozho. Tracks shows early clashes between traditional ways and the Roman Catholic Church. The Bingo Palace (1994), set in the 1980s, describes the effects of a casino and a factory on the reservation community. Tales of Burning Love (1997) finishes the story of Sister Leopolda, a recurring character from all the previous books, and introduces a new set of European-American people into the reservation universe. The Antelope Wife (1998), Erdrich's first novel after her divorce from Dorris, was the first of her novels to be set outside the continuity of the previous books. She subsequently returned to the reservation and nearby towns. She has published five novels since 1998 dealing with events in that fictional area. Among these are The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse (2001) and The Master Butchers Singing Club (2003). Both novels have geographic and character connections with The Beet Queen. In 2009, Erdrich's novel The Plague of Doves was named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction. The narrative focuses on the historical lynching of four Native people wrongly accused of murdering a Caucasian family, and the effect of this injustice on the current generations. In addition to fiction and poetry, Erdrich has published non-fiction. The Blue Jay's Dance (1995) is about her pregnancy and the birth of her first child. Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country traces her travels in northern Minnesota and Ontario's lakes following the birth of her last daughter. Erdrich and her two sisters have hosted writers' workshops on the Turtle Mountain Indian Reservation in North Dakota. Her heritage from both parents is influential in her life and prominent in her work. Although many of Erdrich's works explore her Native American heritage, her novel The Master Butchers Singing Club (2003) featured the European, specifically German, side of her ancestry. The novel includes stories of a World War I veteran and is set in a small North Dakota town. The novel was a finalist for the National Book Award. Erdrich's complexly interwoven series of novels have drawn comparisons with William Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha novels. Like Faulkner's, Erdrich's successive novels created multiple narratives in the same fictional area and combined the tapestry of local history with current themes and modern consciousness. Her bookstore hosts literary readings and other events. Erdrich's new works are read here, and events celebrate the works and careers of other writers as well, particularly local Native writers. Erdrich and her staff consider Birchbark Books to be a "teaching bookstore". In addition to books, the store sells Native art and traditional medicines, and Native American jewelry. Wiigwaas Press, a small nonprofit publisher founded by Erdrich and her sister, is affiliated with the store.

Thomas Matthew McGrath, (November 20, 1916 near Sheldon, North Dakota – September 20, 1990, Minneapolis, Minnesota) was a celebrated American poet and screen writer of documentary films. McGrath grew up on a farm in Ransom County, North Dakota. He earned a B.A. from the University of North Dakota at Grand Forks. He served in the Aleutian Islands with the U.S. Army Air Forces during World War II. He was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship, at Oxford. McGrath also pursued postgraduate studies at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge. He taught at Colby College in Maine and at Los Angeles State College, from which he was dismissed in connection with his appearance, as an unfriendly witness, before the House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1953. Later he taught at North Dakota State University, and Minnesota State University, Moorhead. McGrath was married three times and had one son, Tomasito, to whom much of the poet’s later work was dedicated. McGrath wrote mainly about his own life and social concerns. His best-known work, Letter to an Imaginary Friend, was published in sections between 1957 and 1985 and as a single poem in 1997 by Copper Canyon Press.

William Howard Gass (July 30, 1924 – December 6, 2017) was an American novelist, short-story writer, essayist, critic, and philosophy professor. He penned three novels, three collections of short stories, a collection of novellas, and seven volumes of essays, three of which have won National Book Critics Circle Award prizes and one of which, A Temple of Texts (2006), won the Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism. His 1995 novel The Tunnel received the American Book Award. His 2013 novel Middle C won the 2015 William Dean Howells Medal. William Howard Gass was born on July 30, 1924, in Fargo, North Dakota. Soon after his birth, his family moved to Warren, Ohio, a steel town, where he attended local schools. He has described his childhood as an unhappy one, with an abusive, racist father and a passive, alcoholic mother; critics would later cite his characters as having these same qualities. His father had been trained as an architect but, while serving during the First World War, had sustained back injuries that forced him to take a job as a high school drafting and architectural drawing teacher. His mother was a housewife. As a boy, Gass read anything he could get his hands on. From The Shadow to The History of the French Revolution, Gass read constantly, although there were no bookstores in the town of Warren. Later he would claim that the advent of "pocketbooks" saved his literary life. He'd save up all the money he earned or obtained and, every two weeks, head down and buy as many pocketbooks as he could afford. Even though Gass was always a reader, his father disapproved of his aspirations and often berated him for it. He attended Ohio Wesleyan University after graduating from Warren G. Harding High School, where he did very well, except for some difficulties in mathematics, then served as an ensign in the Navy during World War II for three and a half years, a period he describes as perhaps the worst of his life. He earned his A.B. in philosophy from Kenyon College (1947), where he graduated magna cum laude. From there he entered Cornell University as a Susan Linn Fellow in Philosophy and, by 1954, had earned his PhD in that subject. While at Cornell, he studied under Max Black and, briefly, Ludwig Wittgenstein. In 1952, before graduating from Cornell, he married Mary Pat O'Kelly. His dissertation, "A Philosophical Investigation of Metaphor", was based on his training as a philosopher of language. In graduate school, Gass read the work of Gertrude Stein, who influenced his writing. Gass taught at The College of Wooster for four years, Purdue University for sixteen, and Washington University in St. Louis, where he was a professor of philosophy (1969–1978) and the David May Distinguished University Professor in the Humanities (1979–1999). His colleagues there have included the writers Stanley Elkin, Howard Nemerov (1988 Poet Laureate of the United States), and Mona Van Duyn (1992 Poet Laureate). Since 2000, Gass has been the David May Distinguished University Professor Emeritus in the Humanities. Gass was married to the architect Mary Henderson Gass, author of Parkview: A St. Louis Urban Oasis (2005). They have twin daughters. Catherine Gass is an artist teaching at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and is a photographer for the Newberry Library. Earning a living for himself and his family from university teaching, Gass began to publish stories that were selected for inclusion in The Best American Short Stories of 1959, 1961, 1962, 1968 and 1980, as well as Two Hundred Years of Great American Short Stories. His first novel, Omensetter's Luck, about life in a small town in Ohio in the 1890s, was published in 1966. Critics praised his linguistic virtuosity, establishing him as an important writer of fiction. Richard Gilman in The New Republic called it "the most important work of fiction by an American in this literary generation." In 1968 he published In the Heart of the Heart of the Country, five stories dramatizing the theme of human isolation and the difficulty of love. That same year Gass published Willie Masters' Lonesome Wife, an experimental novella illustrated with photographs and typographical constructs intended to help readers free themselves from the linear conventions of narrative. He has also published several collections of essays, including Fiction and the Figures of Life (1970) and Finding a Form (1996). Cartesian Sonata and Other Novellas was published in 1998, and his novel Middle C was published in 2013. His work has also appeared in The Best American Essays collections of 1986, 1992, and 2000. Gass has cited the anger he felt during his childhood as a major influence on his work, even stating that he writes "to get even." Despite his prolific output, he has said that writing is difficult for him. In fact, his epic novel The Tunnel, published in 1995, took Gass 26 years to write. On the subject of his slow and methodic pace he has said, "I write slowly because I write badly. I have to rewrite everything many, many times just to achieve mediocrity." Critical responses to The Tunnel upon its release included Robert Kelly's declaration that it was an "infuriating and offensive masterpiece," and Steven Moore's claim that it was “a stupendous achievement and obviously one of the greatest novels of the century.” Michael Silverblatt of the Los Angeles Times wrote in his review of the novel: "A bleak, black book, it engenders awe and despair. I have read it in its entirety 4½ times, each time finding its resonance and beauty so great as to demand another reading. As I read, I found myself devastated by the thoroughness of the book's annihilating sensibility and revived by the beauty of its language, the complexity of its design, the melancholy, horror and stoic sympathy in its rendering of what we used to call the human condition." Gass, in reference to the harsh and disquieting nature of The Tunnel said "I don't think anything is sacred and therefore I am prepared to extol or make fun of anything. People who have very settled opinions are going to dislike this book because Kohler [the main character] is the worm inside all that stuff." An unabridged audio version of The Tunnel was released in 2006, with Gass reading the novel himself. Gass typically devotes enormous attention to sentence construction. His prose has been described as flashy, difficult, edgy, masterful, inventive, and musical. Steven Moore, writing in The Washington Post, has called Gass "the finest prose stylist in America." Much of Gass's work is metafictional. In an interview with Anglistik Gass commented on the subject of his genre and form defying works, laughing off the title "Postmodern," and coining himself "Late" or "Decayed Modern" Gass has received many awards and honors, including grants from the Rockefeller Foundation in 1965, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation in 1970. He won the Pushcart Prize awards in 1976, 1983, 1987, and 1992, and in 1994 he received the Mark Twain Award for Distinguished Contribution to the Literature of the Midwest. In 1959 he was awarded the Longview Foundation Prize for Fiction for his story "The Triumph of Israbestis Tott" (a story later included as the first part of his novel Omensetter's Luck). Chicago Tribune Writers' and Critics' Poll named him one of the ten best American writers and one of the ten best Midwest writers in 1973. He has teaching awards from Purdue University and Washington University; in 1968 the Chicago Tribune Award as One of the Ten Best Teachers in the Big Ten. In 1975 he received the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters Award for Fiction. He was a Getty Foundation Fellow in 1991–1992. He received the Lannan Lifetime Achievement Award in 1997; and the American Book Award for The Tunnel in 1996. In 2000 he was honored with the PEN/Nabokov award and the PEN/Nabokov Lifetime Achievement award which he has called his "most prized prize." Gass has received the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism three times, for Habitations of the Word (1985), Finding a Form (1997) and Tests of Time (2003). Gass also received the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay in 2003. In 2007 he was the recipient of the St. Louis Literary Award from the Saint Louis University Library Associates. Gass founded the International Writers Center at Washington University in 1990, whose purpose was to "build on the strengths of its resident and visiting faculty writers; to serve as a focal point for writing excellence in all disciplines and in all cultures; to be a directory for writers and writing programs at Washington University, in St. Louis, in the United States, and around the world; and to present the writer to the reader." Although he retired from teaching full-time in 1999, Gass remains professor emeritus at Washington University. He has made numerous presentations of his photography, and he has a star on the St. Louis Walk of Fame. He also serves on the contributing editorial board of the literary journal Conjunctions. In 2000, Gass received the PEN/Nabokov Award. In 2003, he won the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay for Test of Time. In 2006, William H. Gass was a featured speaker at Lake Forest College for the 2006 & NOW Festival and the Lake Forest Literary Festival. In Dan Simmons' science fiction novel, Hyperion, William Gass is referred to as "the twentieth century's most honoured writer" by the poet Martin Silenus. More recently, Gass has won the 2007 Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism in Memory of Newton Arvin. The winner of this award is chosen by a panel of six authors, and s/he also receives a cash prize of $30,000. The panel awarded Gass for his 2006 collection of essays, A Temple of Texts.

Lois Phillips Hudson was born in Jamestown, North Dakota on August 24, 1927, to Carl Wayne Phillips and Aline Runner Phillips; she was the eldest of three daughters born to the couple. Aline Runner was a teacher with a degree in chemistry, but left the field to become a farm wife when she married Carl, who was a largely self-educated man. The Phillips family lived and farmed outside Cleveland, North Dakota until, ruined by the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl, they were forced to migrate to Washington State in 1935. On their journey, they spent several months as migrant workers moving from location to location, following the crops' picking seasons for available work. During this time, the Phillips girls were considered outsiders in the communities which they passed through, and their educations were not taken seriously by the schools they were placed in, as is depicted in the short story "Children of the Harvest." On arriving finally in Seattle, they found a small house in the Ballard neighborhood, where Carl operated a gas station. Ultimately, the family bought the farm of a man who was unable to pay his taxes. The farm was located on the East Side of Lake Washington, outside the town of Redmond. Lois became the first editor of the Redmond Recorder as an 18-year-old in the 1940s. She went on to graduate from the College (now University) of Puget Sound in Tacoma, where she edited the yearbook. After spending a year teaching junior high school English in Shelton, Washington, she had saved enough money to enter the master's degree program at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. Her lack of funds necessitated her completing the degree in one year. She married Randolph Hudson, a fellow Cornell graduate student in English, in 1952, and the couple moved to California, where their two daughters, Laura and Lucy, were born. She was granted an honorary doctorate by North Dakota State University in 1965; Lawrence Welk also received an honorary doctorate from NDSU at the same ceremony. At the time, he traded Hudson an autographed album in exchange for an autographed copy of The Bones of Plenty. Hudson subsequently taught at both North Dakota State University and the University of Washington, from which she retired in 1992. A prolific writer, her best known works are her novel, The Bones of Plenty, and the collection of short stories Reapers of the Dust: A Prairie Chronicle. Both chronicled the years of the Great Depression in our agricultural heartland. Although both books appear to be highly autobiographical, Hudson often reminded people that they were in fact works of fiction. Other works include two manuscripts unpublished at the time of Hudson's death. The first of these is partly memoir and partly a history of the Redmond, Washington area. Entitled "Unrestorable Habitat: Microsoft Is My Neighbor Now," the work was published in a generally unedited form in March, 2014 (Foreverland Press). The second work, which is novel about the early history of California, The Kindly Fruits of the Earth, is currently under review for possible publication. Additionally, Hudson published a multitude of short stories in a number of publications both nationally (Harper's, The New Yorker, The Reporter) and regionally/locally in Washington (Puget Soundings, a magazine published by the Junior League of Seattle). Hudson was an active environmentalist, who, in addition to publishing many articles on the subject, performed service as a salmon watcher on the Sammamish River. She also wrote extensively on the changes that took place in her chosen home city of Redmond, Washington, over a 65-year period; a topic she was invited to speak about to the Redmond Historical Society. While living in California, she wrote a piece entitled "Four-Lane Menace To California's Redwoods" (published August 12, 1965 in The Reporter), about a freeway project that would cut through the Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park. An avid bicyclist, Hudson had the habit of writing in the morning, and then taking a ten-mile bike ride along the Sammamish River in the afternoon. Her love of the outdoors extended to hiking, swimming and canoeing.

Richard Eugene Lyons was born June 19, 1920 at Detroit, Michigan, the son of Frank C. and Daisy (Sweeny) Lyons. After graduating from high school he attended the University of Dayton for two years. He then went to Miami University at Oxford, Ohio where he earned a B.A. degree in 1942. After several years working in Dayton and recovering from tuberculosis, he returned in 1946 to Miami University to work on a master's degree which he received in 1947. Mr. Lyons then became an English instructor there for a year. In 1948 he went to Indiana University to begin work on a Ph.D degree. In 1950, after two years, Mr. Lyons came to North Dakota Agricultural College where he held a dual position as order librarian and instructor in English. His early work was connected with the North Dakota Institute for Regional Studies where he researched for a proposed anthology of North Dakota writers. In 1959 Mr. Lyons returned full time to the English Department, and that same year took a sabbatical leave to attend the University of Minnesota where he completed his course work towards a degree in American Studies. Mr. Lyons returned to North Dakota State University to teach English until his retirement in 1981.Lyons was a published poet and a graphic artist. Though he concentrated on poetry, he exhibited his prints nationally and some of his writing concerns the visual arts. At Miami University, he was a member of the Poet's Circle. Numerous poems by Mr. Lyons have been published in periodicals including The New Yorker, The Virginia Quarterly Review, and The Kenyon Review. His first major work was Men and Tin Kettles (1956). Other publications include One Squeaking Straw (1958), Paintings in Taxicabs (a study of art consumers in North Dakota, 1965), Above Time (1968), editor of Poetry North: Five Poets of North Dakota (1970), Racer and Lame (1975) and Scanning the Land (1980). In addition to these publications, Mr. Lyons also operated a small printing press in his home on which he produced the publications of the Merrykit Press. His first Merrykit publication was Eclogues in Blue (1947). Richard Lyons was a member of the College English Association, the American Studies Association, the Rourke Art Gallery and Phi Kappa Phi. He was married in 1942 to Marjorie Dunkel. They had two children, Christopher and Cressida. Lyons retired from NDSU in 1982 and moved to Newark, Delaware. Marjorie Lyons died in 1983. In 1994 he moved to Gardiner, Maine, where he continued to write and publish poetry. Richard Lyons died January 29, 2000.

Erling Nicolai Rolfsrud was born September 3, 1912, near Keene, North Dakota on the farm of his parents Nils and Rebecca (Heide) Rolfsrud. He attended Watford City High School and graduated from there in 1930. He briefly attended Minot State College and then taught rural schools for three years in McKenzie County. He attended Concordia College at Moorhead, Minnesota and received a Bachelor’s degree in 1936. Mr. Rolfsrud was on the staff of the North Dakota Education Association for several years, and in 1939 he began writing a column titled “Top Drawer” for its journal North Dakota Teacher, which he continued writing for 22 years. In 1941 he married Beverly Brown of Hettinger, N.D. That same year, he began teaching typing and shorthand classes at Concordia College, and headed the Department of Business Education at Concordia until 1946. After his tenure at Concordia, Mr. Rolfsrud spent eleven years as a freelance writer and produced over ten books. During this period, he lived near Deerwood and Alexandria, Minnesota, where he continued to reside until the time of his death. In 1952, he was a lyceum lecturer for one year in North Dakota schools, and spoke about North Dakota history, and “Extraordinary North Dakotans”. In 1957, he began teaching English at Alexandria High School, which he continued to do until 1978. Mr. Rolfsrud also taught an Adult Education Creative Writing course in Alexandria. Mr. Rolfsrud was a prolific writer who wrote articles and short stories, as well as newspaper columns for several North Dakota and Minnesota newspapers. He is an author who published 31 books from 1949-1993, many of which are about North Dakota and have North Dakota settings. He may best be remembered for his books on North Dakota. Some of his better known books include: Lanterns Over the Prairies, Book I (1949), Lanterns Over the Prairies, Book II (1950), Gopher Tails for Papa(1951), White Angakok (1952),Brother to the Eagle(1952) Extraordinary North Dakotans(1954), Boy from Johnny Butte, (1954) Cobber Chronicle(1966), Story of the Red River Land(1967), and Flickertail Stories (1989).In addition to his writing, Mr. Rolfsrud traveled the state of North Dakota giving speeches and lectures on his writing and the state’s history. Mr. Rolfsrud also taught a Bethel Bible class, and was a church organist for forty years. In 1965, Mr. Rolfsrud was selected as one of the 75 “Heroes” in North Dakota’s history, and in 1989 he was inducted into North Dakota’s Scandinavian-American Hall of Fame. Rolfsrud was recipient of the Red River Valley Historical Society's Pioneer Historian Award and of the Concordia College Alumni Achievement Award in 1974. In 1991, the Red River Valley Heritage Society presented him with their Lake Agassiz Publication Award. Mr. Rolfsrud died August 21, 1994 at Alexandria, Minnesota. He is survived by his wife and six children.

Larry Alfred Woiwode (/ˈwaɪwʊdi/; born October 30, 1941) is an American writer who lives in North Dakota, where he has been the state's Poet Laureate since 1995. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, Esquire, The Atlantic Monthly, Harpers, Gentleman's Quarterly, The Partisan Review and The Paris Review. He is the author of five novels; two collections of short stories, a commentary titled "Acts," a biography of the Gold Seal founder and entrepreneur, Harold Schafer, Aristocrat of the West, a book of poetry, Even Tide; and reviews and essays and essay-reviews that have appeared in dozens of publications, including The New York Times and The Washington Post Book World. Woiwode's first novel, What I'm Going to Do, I Think (1969) won acclaim, and received the William Faulkner Foundation Award (1970) for the best first novel of 1969; Beyond the Bedroom Wall (1975) sold over 1,000,000 copies, and was a finalist for both the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Talking about the title of this novel, Woiwode told Alok Mishra in an interview that he wanted to suggest that a larger world of interest lay beyond the bedroom. It was because most of the novels of that time dealt with sex excessively! He has received two awards from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, including the Medal of Merit, rewarded every six years, for a "distinguished contribution to the art of the short story": a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, a Lannan Foundation Literary Fellowship and a Lannan Foundation Studio Award; the John Dos Passos Prize, for a distinguished body of work, and the Aga Khan Prize for short fiction, and the Theodore Roosevelt Roughrider Award, the highest honor a North Dakota citizen may receive, among other awards and prizes, and he has published two dozen stories in The New Yorker. Born in Carrington, North Dakota, Woiwode attended the University of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign) for four-and-a-half years, where he worked with John Frederick Nims and Charles Shattuck, and after serving as copywriter and voice-over and live talent for a CBS affiliate in the area he left to live in New York for five years; later he returned to New York state, after the death of John Gardner, and took Gardner's position as director of the Creative Writing Program at Binghamton University; he was a tenured full professor there, besides directing the Creative Writing Program. He spent several years living and working on short stories and his third novel in the Chicago area before returning to North Dakota in 1978, where he lives twelve miles outside Mott and raises registered quarter horses. Besides his tenure at Binghamton, he has served as Writer in Residence at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and conducted summer sessions as a professor at Wheaton College, Chicago, and the C.S. Lewis Seminars at Cambridge; he has also conducted seminars and workshops in fourteen states of the U.S., all of the Canadian provinces but British Columbia, and in England, Lithuania, and the Scandinavians. His work has been translated into a dozen languages, and Johnathan Yardley, of the Washington Post Book Work, named Beyond the Bedroom Wall one of the 20 best novels of the 20th Century. Woiwode has published a dozen books in a variety of genres, six of which have been named notable books of the year by the New York Times Book Review. His most recent publications are two memoirs that were widely received and reviewed, What I Think I Did and A Step From Death. He is currently Writer in Residence at the University of Jamestown in Jamestown, North Dakota.

Dr. David R. Solheim (1947-) was born in Elgin (N.D.) and raised in Bismarck (N.D.), graduating from Bismarck High School in 1965. He has published poetry in over a dozen literary periodicals.  In addition to the books: Riverbend: Poems, The Landscape Listens: Poems, We're the People Too: Tales from America's Largest Minority, Green Jade and Road Men, West River: 100 Poems, the Territorial Press (MN) published two chapbooks of his work, On The Ward (1973) and Inheritance (1987).  His work has also been included in several anthologies.  He received the John Hove Writing Fellowship from the North Dakota Council on the Arts and was an international exchange artist in Winnipeg, Manitoba.  He was the North Dakota Statehood Centennial Poet and is an Emeritus Associate Poet Laureate of North Dakota.  He has also published an interview, book reviews, and essays in several periodicals and edited anthologies of creative writing. Solheim also had an award-winning teaching career of over 30 years, most of them at Dickinson State University and is a DSU Emeritus Professor of English.  He traveled to the Peoples’ Republic of China with a North Dakota University System Faculty Group and was a visiting professor at Northwest Agriculture and Forestry University in Yang-ling, China. He has conducted creative writing workshops for kindergarten through graduate students, and for the general public including the elderly.  He holds degrees in English and creative writing from Gustavus Adolphus College, Stanford University, and the University of Denver.  In 1968 Solheim married Joan Senzek, also a member of the Bismarck High School class of 1965, and they remained together until her death in 1997. Dave and Joan have two children, Benjamin Sung Ho and Julia Joo Hyun. In 2001 Dave married Dr. Barbara Laman (also an Emeritus Professor of English at DSU), together they have 5 children and 5 grandchildren. They live in St. Peter, MN.

Kathie Ryckman Anderson, a sixth generation North Dakotan is the author of Dakota: The Literary Heritage of the Northern Prairie State (1990)  one of four volumes published for the state’s centennial. Anderson is a native of southern Emmons County. She received undergraduate training at the University of North Dakota (UND) and taught English and journalism in Grand Forks and Bismarck high schools. In 1975 she was selected as “Young Careerist 1975” by the North Dakota Federation of Business and Professional Women’s Clubs. As holder of this title she attended the National Federation of Business and Professional Women’s Clubs annual conference at Las Vegas (Nev.). In 1981, she completed her Master of Arts degree at UND with the thesis "Introducing North Dakota Writers to North Dakota Readers.” 

Sources: Ancestry.com, Newspapers.com, Bismarck Tribune, Minot Daily News.

INVENTORY

00931-00001 Louise Erdrich (born Karen Louise Erdrich) portrait from book 1989
00931-00002 Thomas Matthew McGrath portrait from book 1987
00931-00003 William Howard Gass portrait from book 1985
00931-00004 Lois Phillips Hudson portrait from book 1980
00931-00005 Richard Eugene Lyons portrait from book 1980
00931-00006 Erling Nicolai Rolfsrud portrait from book 1989
00931-00007 Larry Alfred Woiwode portrait by Nancy Crampton from book 1980
00931-00008 David R. Solheim portrait by David Doleator from book 1991
00931-00009-01 David R. Solheim at the opening of the Language of the Land: Journey into Literary North Dakota presentation at the ND Heritage Center February 4, 1994
00931-00009-02 David R. Solheim at the opening of the Language of the Land: Journey into Literary North Dakota presentation at the ND Heritage Center February 4, 1994
00931-00010 David R. Solheim and Larry Alfred Woiwode at the opening of the Language of the Land: Journey into Literary North Dakota presentation at the ND Heritage Center February 4, 1994
00931-00011 David R. Solheim and Louise Erdrich, authors at the Language of the Land: Journey into Literary North Dakota presentation at the ND Heritage Center February 4, 1994
00931-00012 Kathie Ryckman Anderson, author signing books at the opening of the Language of the Land: Journey into Literary North Dakota presentation at the ND Heritage Center February 4, 1994
00931-00013 Lois Phillips Hudson, author speaking at podium during exhibit of the Language of the Land: Journey into Literary North Dakota presentation at the ND Heritage Center March 11, 1994
00931-00014 Larry Alfred Woiwode speaking after receiving the North Dakota Rough Rider October 23, 1992
00931-00015 Larry Alfred Woiwode North Dakota Rough Rider painting by Vern Skaug October 23, 1992

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