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John Joseph Mathews: Life of an Osage Writer (American Indian Literature and Critical Studies Series)

Amazon.com Price:  $17.06 (as of 23/04/2019 15:17 PST- Details)

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John Joseph Mathews (1894–1979) is one of Oklahoma’s most revered twentieth-century authors. An Osage Indian, he used to be also one of the most first Indigenous authors to gain national renown. Yet fame did not come easily to Mathews, and his personality used to be full of contradictions. In this captivating biography, Michael Snyder provides the first book-length account of this fascinating figure.

Referred to as “Jo” to all his friends, Mathews had a multifaceted identity. A novelist, naturalist, biographer, historian, and tribal preservationist, he used to be a true “man of letters.” Snyder draws on a wealth of sources, many of them prior to now untapped, to narrate Mathews’s story. Much of the author’s family life—especially his two marriages and his relationships with his two children and two stepchildren—is explored here for the first time.

Born in the town of Pawhuska in Indian Territory, Mathews attended the University of Oklahoma before venturing in a foreign country and earning a second degree from Oxford. He served as a flight instructor right through World War I, traveled across Europe and northern Africa, and bought and sold land in California. A proud Osage who devoted himself to preserving Osage culture, Mathews also served as tribal councilman and cultural historian for the Osage Nation.

Like many gifted artists, Mathews used to be not without flaws. And perhaps in the eyes of a few critics, he occupies a nebulous space in literary history. Through insightful analysis of his major works, especially his semiautobiographical novel Sundown and his meditative Talking to the Moon, Snyder revises this impression. The story he tells, of one remarkable individual, could also be the story of the Osage Nation, the state of Oklahoma, and Native The us in the twentieth century.

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