About this item
Highlights
- Winner of the Pulitzer Prize"A romantic idyll played out in the rhythms and meanings of a vanished Navajo world.
- Author(s): Oliver La Farge & Wanden LaFarge Gomez
- 193 Pages
- Fiction + Literature Genres, Classics
Description
About the Book
Capturing the essence of the Southwest in 1915, Oliver La Farge's Pulitzer Prize-winning first novel is an enduring American classic. At a ceremonial dance, the young, earnest silversmith Laughing Boy falls in love with Slim Girl, a beautiful but elusive American-educated Navajo. As they experience all of the joys and uncertainties of first love, the couple must face a changing way of life and its tragic consequences.Book Synopsis
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize
"A romantic idyll played out in the rhythms and meanings of a vanished Navajo world." --Denver Post
An enduring American classic, Oliver La Farge's award-winning first novel captures the essence of the Southwest in the early twentieth century.
Laughing Boy is a model member of his tribe. Raised in old traditions, skilled in silver work, and known for his prowess in the wild horse races, he does the Navajos of T'o Tlakai proud. But times are changing. It is 1914, and the first car has just driven into their country. Then, Laughing Boy meets Slim Girl--and despite her "American" education and the warnings of his family, he gives in to desire and marries her.
As Laughing Boy and Slim Girl settle away from traditional villages--their different upbringings clashing within both their relationship and the ever-encroaching culture around them--each of their worlds are thrown into a heart-wrenching turmoil of love, honor, hope, and heritage.
"Compelling in its strength and simplicity, and its fidelity to the deepest impulses of human nature," Laughing Boy is an unprecedented look at both the Navajo culture and the enduring legacy of tradition and loss that all Americans share (New York Times).
Review Quotes
"[A novel of] lucid beauty, vital artistic imagination, and a clear, almost hypnotic style." -- New York Times
"A romantic idyll played out in the rhythms and meanings of a vanished Navajo world." -- Denver Post
"A seminal book. . . . Most of us read Laughing Boy when we were young and were awakened to the splendor of a new material for the American novel." -- Jim Harrison, author of Legends of the Fall
"A daring experiment, triumphantly successful. . . . The tale is haunting and poetic in an extraordinary degree." -- Owen Wister, author of The Virginian
"Compelling in its strength and simplicity, and in its fidelity to the deepest impulses of human nature." -- New York Times