ABSTRACT
Five books representing biography, fiction, history, and nonfiction comprise the bulk of John Joseph Mathews’s published writing. Literary historians cite his Sundown (1934) as among the earliest novels written by an Indian, although there is general agreement that it is overshadowed by the more polished The Surrounded of D’Arcy McNickle, published two years later. More widely known in its time than his novel was Wah’Kon-Tah (1932), a Book-of-the-Month Club selection. Some of Mathews’s most memorable prose is found in Talking to the Moon (1945), where his mixture of folklore, naturalistic description, and personal rumination has elicited comparison to Thoreau’s reflections on his Walden experience (Ruoff 1983: 164). His final book, The Osages: Children of the Middle Waters (1961), is regarded as one of the most “literary” tribal histories and an outstanding early example of the ethnohistorical mode.
