Thesis: D'Arcy McNickle's ‘The Surrounded’ sparked the renaissance of Native American Literature and reinvented American Indian Story Telling.
Native Americans found themselves lost in the cultural matrix that was controlled by the whites. Indians make the biggest portion of Native Americans, and their interrelationships with other people and races resulted to a dilution of their cultures such that it was difficult to find a pure Indian. For McNickle, he qualified for an Indian through the ‘quarter Indian’ requirement that meant someone had to have at least a grandparent of the Indian origin. The novel, The Surrounded was his first book, published in 1935 after the previous series of rejections. Interestingly, it was one of the rejection letters ...
