This Pulitzer Prize-winning novel captures the essence of the Southwest in the early 1900s-and depicts a young Native American couple experiencing all the uncertainties and joys of first love. Laughing Boy is one of the most powerful novels in American fiction."Lucid beauty, vital artistic imagination, and a clear, almost hypnotic style."-New York Times"Daring...triumphantly successful!"-Owen Wister, author of The Virginian

Laughing boy

Literature & Fiction

Oliver La Farge

Literary

Barrie and Jenkins

Discusses the distinctive culture and lifestyles of North American Indians from the Ice Age Migration to the 1973 occupation of Wounded Knee

A Pictorial History of the American Indian

History

Americas

Random House Value Publishing

Oliver LaFarge, a graduate in anthropology as well as a Pulitzer Prize winning poet, writes passionately about the histry culture and modern plight of the Native American. He was twice president of the Association on American Indian Affairs. Hundreds of photos and drawings, 16 pages of which are in full color.

Alvin M. Joseph

Crown

A colorful anthology captures the Pueblo culture through an array of stories, poems, and paintings depicting the Pueblo way of life as well as their celebrations, beliefs, symbols, and more.

The Serpent's Tongue: Prose, Poetry, and Art of the New Mexican Pueblos

Tony Hillerman

Barry Lopez

Joe S. Sando

Frank Hamilton Cushing

Leslie Marmon Silko

Oliver Littlebird

Simon J. Ortiz

Willa, Cather

Arts & Photography

Dutton

Laughing Boy

Kessinger Publishing

Laughing Boy (Signet Classics)

Children's Books

Rebound by Sagebrush

The mother ditch, or acequia madre, is the main water line that is dug by hand and feeds many of the smaller acequias that cover the fertile land of Northern New Mexico. The acequias, water ditches, were used to irrigate the fields of crops for many farmers in the early days of settlement in New Mexico. A unique technology, the acequia, especially the mother ditch, had to be taken care of by everyone in the community that benefited from its generosity. A governing body was established to watch over the utilization and maintenance of the ditch. The mayordomo was the top elected official to preside over the governing council, and he was also required to perform numerous responsibilities representative of the people of the community. The acequia was truly one of the last vestiges of a life where people depended on each other for survival. The life of the community revolved around the acequia. Cooperation was essential to ensure everyone's sustenance. Today, many of the acequias the early settlers of New Mexico depended on have dried up. Yet, when one stands in the footings of these sand pits, you can feel the presence of the power of water that was so significant to the development of human progress in this part of the continent. English and Spanish edition.

The Mother Ditch (English and Spanish Edition)

Education & Reference

Sunstone Press

In his first book, the Pulitzer Prize novel Laughing Boy, Oliver La Farge gave us a superb lyrical story of Navajo Indian life. In the fullness of his maturity as a writer, he later returned to the Navajo scene with The Enemy Gods, a richer, deeper book than he had written before and its theme, both an absorbing story and a living social document, is nearer to his heart. It centers around Myron Begay--Divine Arrow is his Indian name--a young Navajo who is apparently won away from his tribe until he believes that he can solve the problem of life by making an imitation white man out of himself. Never able to escape from what he really is--a potential leader of his own people--he becomes more and more confused until he finally breaks down and commits murder. As one under a curse, Myron instinctively goes back into the Navajo country where he drifts as a lost soul. Through a series of superb scenes, the story rises to the final emotional crisis leading to the solution of his life.

The Enemy Gods (Southwest Heritage)

United States

The Autobiographical Examination of an Artist's Journey into Maturity with a New Foreword by Marc Simmons and An Appreciation by John Pen La Farge. The long, uneasy armistice between two world wars was a trying time for literary artists, particularly for those young men who came to maturity in that period of economic and social upheaval. Oliver La Farge's frank and honest personal narrative is a typical life of one born into the easy world of Newport, New York, Groton, and Harvard, dumped into the melting pot of the Great Depression, and then slammed up against the global war. His purpose ''to record the America of one individual'' and to set down the raw material from which the writer derives the finished product he offers to the world, is vividly fulfilled in this book. In an Appreciation appearing in this new edition, John Pen La Farge says: ''In his autobiography, Raw Material, Father wrote a superior account of one man's life. As Mother pointed out, it was superior because it was not a mere accounting of what, when, how, and in what order, rather, it was the account of how the raw material of one boy grew into a man, a man whose life both displayed and sought out true integrity.''

Raw Material (Southwest Heritage)

Biographies & Memoirs

Arts & Literature

Behind the Mountains

Imagine yourself in a secluded green valley high in the mountains of northern New Mexico. You are one of a large family who own a sheep and cattle ranch surrounding the little village of Rociada. Your father, a Spaniard, is the revered and distinguished Jose Baca, and your mother, Dona Marguerite, is of French descent. Everyone in the village loves and respects your family as their patrones, appealing to them in times of trouble and bringing them gifts at Christmas.
 Out of the everyday life of the Baca family, the village people, their customs and superstitions, Oliver La Farge has drawn, for example, the touching story of young Pino's disillusionment with his hero, the horse thief Pascual. Or there is the account of the wedding shoes that pinched until the bride was in tears. Then there is Carmen's discovery of treachery in the unlit hovel of the blind religious and the amusing tale of how Pino was punished for his arrogance the night the Archbishop came to dinner.
 But beneath this rippling surface of adventure, tenderness, and humor rides the gradual encroachment of the outside world on Rociada, one of the last survivals of the ancient Spanish way of life in the United States. Finally, this idyllic village succumbs to the invasion of tourists and the machine, and Rociada becomes only a dream of the past.

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Books by Oliver La Farge