50 Fun Facts About Sherman Alexie

From 2010 to 2019, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian topped which American Library Association list?

Most challenged books was the list it led for the whole decade, drawing objections to how it treats alcohol, poverty, bullying and sexuality.

Which major US prize did The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian win for Young People's Literature?

National Book Award judges chose it in 2007, and Alexie has guessed that the novel is about seventy-eight percent true to his own teenage years.

A story title in The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven claims a father saw which guitarist play at Woodstock?

Jimi Hendrix playing the national anthem is the father's boast, and the story has Victor recalling his few good memories of the man who left.

Which horror novelist did Sherman Alexie credit as an influence for always writing about underdogs and bullied kids?

Stephen King wrote about kids fighting back against overwhelming forces, Alexie said, which spoke to a boy who was constantly teased at his reservation school.

Sherman Alexie joined The Colbert Report in 2014 to urge a boycott of which retailer during its dispute with Hachette?

Amazon had delayed or blocked orders of Hachette titles, so the show sent viewers to an Oregon bookshop to buy a debut novelist's book instead.

Smoke Signals, written by Sherman Alexie, won the Audience Award and Filmmaker's Trophy at which 1998 film festival?

Sundance audiences voted it their favorite, and Miramax released the film in American cinemas that summer.

On the farm-town high school basketball team where Sherman Alexie starred, who was the only other Indian?

The mascot was his only company because the school's teams were nicknamed the Indians, though Alexie was its sole Native student.

In Smoke Signals, which Hollywood western has Victor's storytelling friend watched countless times?

Dances with Wolves, winner of seven Academy Awards, marks the friend out as the film's romantic, in contrast to the stoic Victor.

The nine stories of Sherman Alexie's Ten Little Indians follow Spokane Indians living in and around which city?

Seattle is where Alexie himself settled after leaving the reservation, and much of his later fiction follows Native characters into the city.

The Lone Ranger and Tonto, borrowed for the title of Sherman Alexie's 1993 story collection, debuted in which medium?

Radio introduced the masked hero and his sidekick in 1933, sixteen years before television did, and Alexie uses the pair as symbols of white and Native identity.

In The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, which best friend feels betrayed when Junior changes schools?

Rowdy knocks Junior unconscious when their schools meet on the basketball court, yet the two reconcile over a game at the novel's end.

In The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, which teacher gets a broken nose from Junior's flying textbook?

Mr. P visits Junior at home afterwards and convinces him to leave the reservation school for a better one.

In The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, what discovery inside a textbook makes Junior hurl it in fury?

His mother's name shows the book is some thirty years old, and Alexie took the scene from his own schooldays, though he only hit a wall.

In The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, what is the name of the sick family dog Junior's father shoots?

Oscar falls badly ill and the family cannot afford a vet, an early lesson for Junior in what poverty takes away.

In The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, which volleyball player becomes Junior's crush at his new school?

Penelope longs to leave her small town and see the world, which is part of what draws her to the new boy from the reservation.

In The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, which bookish boy becomes Junior's first friend at his new school?

Gordy does everything in the name of science, helps Junior with schoolwork and teaches him to take reading seriously.

Which Marbles cartoonist drew Junior's cartoons in The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian?

Ellen Forney drew the 65 illustrations, which stand in for Junior's own cartoons and help move the plot along.

In The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, how does Junior's grandmother die after attending a powwow?

By a drunk driver, though she never touched alcohol herself, and her dying wish is for the family to forgive him.

Who narrates the audiobook of The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, winner of the 2009 Odyssey Award?

The author himself reads it, and his delivery has to carry the jokes of the cartoons that a listener cannot see.

What nickname did fellow students give the young Sherman Alexie because of his unusually large head?

The Globe was one taunt among many: classmates also mocked his government-issued, horn-rimmed glasses.

Sherman Alexie had brain surgery as a baby, at high risk of dying, to treat which condition he was born with?

Hydrocephalus, a build-up of fluid in the brain, left him with seizures until he was seven, and he gave the same condition to his hero Junior.

Sherman Alexie grew up in which small town on the Spokane Indian Reservation, also the home of his fictional Junior?

Wellpinit is an unincorporated community whose ZIP code area counted just 930 people in the 2000 census.

Sherman Alexie left the reservation to attend high school in which farm town 22 miles away?

Reardan elected him class president and put him on the debate team, and its high school reappears under its real name in his fiction.

Which Jesuit school in Spokane gave Sherman Alexie a college scholarship in 1985, though he left two years later?

Gonzaga proved an unhappy fit: under pressure to succeed he drank heavily, and found comfort only in literature classes.

Where did Sherman Alexie take the creative writing class, taught by poet Alex Kuo, that set him writing?

Washington State University is where Kuo handed him an anthology of Native American poetry, the book that inspired him to write his own.

Sherman Alexie began college training for which career, until classroom dissections made him squeamish?

Medicine lost him in anatomy class; he switched to law, found that unsuitable too, and only settled once he reached literature courses.

Sherman Alexie is a citizen of the Spokane Tribe, but his father belonged to which tribe based in Idaho?

Coeur d'Alene country reached the screen in 1998, when the film of his stories was set and shot on the tribe's reservation.

Lillian Alexie helped support Sherman Alexie and his five siblings by sewing which handmade items?

Quilts brought in money alongside her job as a clerk at the reservation trading post, with six children to feed.

As a bookish reservation child, Sherman Alexie read everything available, even manuals on which subject?

Auto repair guides counted as reading matter for a boy whose health problems kept him out of many boyhood activities.

A law banning a Mexican American studies program saw Sherman Alexie's books pulled from classrooms in which state?

Arizona's HB 2281 took his books out of the curriculum in 2012, and Alexie answered that the ban had only given them enormous power.

Which Cheyenne and Arapaho director, later behind Dark Winds, filmed Sherman Alexie's screenplay for Smoke Signals?

Chris Eyre has called it a film about forgiveness, a universal theme he expected to keep audiences coming back for years.

In Smoke Signals, Victor and a storytelling friend travel to which city to collect the ashes of Victor's father?

Phoenix is where Arnold Joseph died years after abandoning his family, and the two friends finally scatter his ashes into a river.

Which actor, later seen in Windtalkers and Flags of Our Fathers, played Victor Joseph in Smoke Signals?

Adam Beach found his breakout role as the hot-tempered Victor, and later played US Marine Ira Hayes for the screen.

In 2018 the Library of Congress chose Smoke Signals for which roll of culturally significant American movies?

National Film Registry status came twenty years after release for what is recognized as the first feature written, directed and produced by Native Americans to reach a wide audience.

According to Sherman Alexie, where did the title The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven first come to him?

In a dream is his account, and the title story follows a man who moves back to the reservation after living in the city with a white girlfriend.

Which storyteller in The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven is put on trial for telling uncomfortable truths?

Thomas Builds-the-Fire had long wanted an audience for his stories, and the trial hands him one, along with an absurd sentence.

In Sherman Alexie's "Indian Education", what must the second-grade narrator do with a spelling test he just passed?

Eat it is the order from Betty Towle, a missionary teacher who sets him harder tests than his classmates and punishes him for passing.

In Sherman Alexie's "Indian Education", a teacher assumes the ninth-grader who faints at a dance has been doing what?

Drinking is the stereotype the teacher reaches for, when in fact doctors diagnose diabetes that night after a long game in an overheated gym.

In Sherman Alexie's "Indian Education", the narrator finishes twelfth grade at a farm-town high school with which honor?

Valedictorian of the white school, he struggles to fit the cap over his long hair while his old reservation classmates graduate back home.

In Sherman Alexie's first novel, Reservation Blues, what do three Spokane friends name the rock band they start?

Coyote Springs wins a battle of the bands for a thousand dollars before a record-label audition in New York goes disastrously wrong.

In Sherman Alexie's Reservation Blues, which real musician said to have sold his soul leaves behind a magic guitar?

Robert Johnson, who in the novel faked his death, turns up on the Spokane reservation looking for Big Mom, who he hopes can save him.

Which Sherman Alexie novel follows John Smith, a Native man adopted and raised by white parents?

Indian Killer is a murder mystery in which a serial killer scalps white men, and Alexie once planned to direct a film version himself.

In Sherman Alexie's novel Flight, the time-traveling teen hero wakes in a Native camp on the eve of which 1876 battle?

Little Bighorn is where he becomes a boy who cannot speak, spots Crazy Horse in the camp and watches Custer's defeat.

Which 2009 Sherman Alexie collection of stories and poems won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction?

War Dances earned him a prize decided by fellow writers: its organizers call it the largest peer-juried award in the country.

In Sherman Alexie's "What You Pawn I Will Redeem", which stolen heirloom does Jackson Jackson spot in a pawnshop?

His grandmother's regalia was stolen fifty years earlier, and the pawnbroker gives him one day to raise $999 to buy the powwow outfit back.

Which 1992 Sherman Alexie collection of stories and poems shares its title with a film he directed a decade later?

The Business of Fancydancing takes its name from a flashy, competitive style of powwow dance that Alexie likens to his own writing.

For the 2002 film he wrote and directed, Sherman Alexie hired a crew made up almost entirely of whom?

Women filled nearly every crew job, and many of the actors improvised their dialogue from real events in their own lives.

In Sherman Alexie's picture book Thunder Boy Jr., what does the young hero want most?

A name of his own is the wish, and the writer knew the feeling: like his hero, Sherman Alexie Jr. was named for his father.

As guest editor of The Best American Poetry 2015, Sherman Alexie picked a poem by a white poet hiding behind what?

A Chinese pen name, Yi-Fen Chou, was Michael Derrick Hudson's disguise, and Alexie kept the poem in the book after learning the truth.

Sherman Alexie's 2017 memoir You Don't Have to Say You Love Me shares its title with a 1966 hit for which singer?

Dusty Springfield took the ballad to number one in Britain, while Alexie's memoir mixes poems and essays about his late mother.