ABSTRACT
As Oliver La Farge pointed out in a 1936 review of D’Arcy McNickle’s first novel, The Surrounded, McNickle was one of the earliest American Indian writers to publish a novel of historical as well as literary importance. Not only was his literary craftsmanship, honed by a year at Oxford University in England, as good as that of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and other contemporary non-Indian writers, he also managed to take his subject-the situation of the American Indian on his reservation-beyond the established historical and literary stereotypes and preconceptions. McNickle’s fictions advocate neither the romanticized American Indian of the popular frontier romances nor the unconditional assimilation predicated by writers of American history and by American Indian writers like John Milton Oskison and John Joseph Mathews. His fictional characters make clear that the American Indian had to find his own way in the drastically changed world of the twentieth century in order to maintain his spiritual values. And, finally, McNickle’s The Surrounded foreshadowed N. Scott Momaday’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel House Made of Dawn (1968) by more than thirty years and, therefore, must be considered the first fiction of the Native American Renaissance.
