Contents Introduction Chapter I native American Renaissance, its beginning and main representatives of the period

Ceremony Leslie Marmon Silko's novel Ceremony was first published by Penguin in March 1977 to much critical acclaim. The novel tells the story of Tayo, a wounded returning World War II veteran of mixed Laguna-white ancestry following a short stint at a Los Angeles VA hospital. He is returning to the poverty-stricken Laguna reservation, continues to suffer from "battle fatigue" (shell-shock), and is haunted by memories of his cousin Rocky who died in the conflict during the Bataan Death March of 1942. His initial escape from pain discovers his alcoholism but his Old Grandma and mixed-blood Navajo medicine-man Betonie help him through native ceremonies to develop a greater understanding of the world and his place as a Laguna man. Ceremony has been called a Grail fiction, wherein the hero overcomes a series of challenges to reach a specified goal; but this point of view has been criticized as Eurocentric, since it involves a Native American contextualizing backdrop, and not one based on European-American myths. Silko's writing skill in the novel is deeply rooted in the use of story telling that pass on traditions and understanding from the old to the new. Fellow Pueblo poet Paula Gunn Allen criticized the book on this account, saying that Silko was divulging secret tribal knowledge reserved for the tribe, not outsiders. Ceremony gained immediate and long-term acceptance when returning Vietnam war veterans took to the novel's theme of coping, healing and reconciliation between races and people that share the trauma of military actions. It was largely on the strength of this work that critic Alan Velie named Silko one of his Four Native American Literary Masters, along with N. Scott Momaday, Gerald Vizenor and James Welch. Ceremony remains a literary work featured on college and university syllabi, and one of the few individual works by any Native American author to have received book-length critical inquiry.
1980s - Storyteller. In 1981, Silko released Storyteller, a collection of poems and short stories that incorporated creative writing, mythology, and autobiography, which garnered favorable reception as it followed in much the same poetic form as the novel Ceremony. Delicacy and Strength of Lace In 1986, Delicacy and Strength of Lace was released. The book is a collected volume of correspondence between Silko and her friend James Wright whom she met following the publication of Ceremony. The work was edited by Wright's wife, Ann Wright, and released after Wright's death in March 1980.