Laughing Boy
by Oliver La Farge
Summary
Laughing Boy is a young Navajo silversmith and horseman from a traditional family, and he meets Slim Girl at a ceremonial dance in 1915. She is beautiful, quick and slightly foreign to him, and the elders warn him off her in exactly the way guaranteed to fail. They marry, and the novel is their marriage: two people building a private world in the desert borderland between his intact tradition and the American machinery that has already processed her.
Because that is what Slim Girl is: a child taken to the government boarding school, stripped of language and kin, returned fitting nowhere, and surviving since by means she conceals from her husband, including a white man in town. She wants back in, and Laughing Boy is her door as much as her love; she learns weaving, he works silver, and the middle of the book gives their happiness real time and real texture, the ceremonies, the horses, the trading posts, before the concealment does what concealment does in fiction. The ending is swift and hard, and La Farge grants it the dignity of ceremony rather than melodrama, with Laughing Boy performing his grief exactly as his tradition instructs.
The anthropology is the book's spine: ritual, kinship and craft rendered with a specialist's precision and a young writer's romanticism at once.
Around three hundred pages.
Best for readers curious what sympathetic white writing about Native life looked like at its 1929 best, read now alongside the Native novelists, Momaday onward, who eventually answered it.
Historical Context & Significance
Laughing Boy won the Pulitzer Prize for the Novel in 1930, a first novel by a twenty eight year old Harvard trained anthropologist who had done ethnographic fieldwork in Navajo country. Oliver La Farge spent the rest of his life on the obligation the book created: he became the leading white advocate for Native American rights of his generation, serving as president of the Association on American Indian Affairs and fighting termination era policy from Santa Fe until his death in 1963.
The novel's afterlife took a constitutional turn. It was among the nine books a Long Island school board pulled from its shelves in 1976, and the resulting case, Island Trees v. Pico, reached the Supreme Court in 1982 and produced the standing precedent limiting school boards' power to remove books they dislike.
Its literary standing has moved the other way: once the canonical Indian novel of American letters, it now reads as a sympathetic outsider's artefact, and the Native American Renaissance that began with House Made of Dawn in 1969 is the measure of everything it could not do.