The Award Tally
FictionNonfiction
Back to the full ranking
Black Elk: The Life of an American Visionary cover

Black Elk: The Life of an American Visionary

Joe Jackson

1

award won

6

score

Black Elk: The Life of an American Visionary

Black Elk won the Society of American Historians' Francis Parkman Prize, the PEN / Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography, the Western Writers of America 2017 Spur Award for Best Western Biography, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography, was long-listed for the Cundill History Prize, and was named one of the Best Books of 2016 by The Boston Globe. Black Elk, the Native American holy man, is known to millions of readers around the world from his 1932 testimonial Black Elk Speaks. Adapted by the poet John G. Neihardt from a series of interviews with Black Elk and other elders at the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, Black Elk Speaks is one of the most widely read and admired works of American Indian literature. Cryptic and deeply personal, it has been read as a spiritual guide, a philosophical manifesto, and a text to be deconstructed—while the historical Black Elk has faded from view. In this sweeping book, Joe Jackson provides the definitive biographical account of a figure whose dramatic life converged with some of the most momentous events in the history of the American West. Born in an era of rising violence between the Sioux, white settlers, and U.S. government troops, Black Elk killed his first man at the Little Bighorn, witnessed the death of his second cousin Crazy Horse, and traveled to Europe with Buffalo Bill's Wild West show. Upon his return, he was swept up in the traditionalist Ghost Dance movement and shaken by the Massacre at Wounded Knee. But Black Elk was not a warrior, instead accepting the path of a healer and holy man, motivated by a powerful prophetic vision that he struggled to understand. Although Black Elk embraced Catholicism in his later years, he continued to practice the old ways clandestinely and never refrained from seeking meaning in the visions that both haunted and inspired him. In Black Elk, Jackson has crafted a true American epic, restoring to its subject the richness of his times and gorgeously portraying a life of heroism and tragedy, adaptation and endurance, in an era of permanent crisis on the Great Plains.

Buy this book at Amazon
Publisher
Macmillan + ORM
Year
2016
ISBN-13
9780374709617
Genre
Biography & Memoir
Topics
Native American historySpirituality and visionary experienceAmerican West

If you liked Black Elk: The Life of an American Visionary, you could also like these

Similar Topics