Michael Dorris

1945-1997

Award winning author Michael Dorris, who sometimes wrote under the pseudonym "Milou North," was born in Louisville, Kentucky in 1945 and died on April 10, 1997 at the young age of 52. His mother was of Irish and Swiss descent and his father was of Modoc Indian, French and English descent. Dorris founded the Native American Studies Program at Dartmouth and in 1971 became one of the first American bachelors to adopt a child, a boy with fetal alcohol syndrome. His most acclaimed book is The Broken Cord which was written in 1989.

Dorris married Louise Erdrich in 1981 and to the public eye the two were a seemingly perfect literary couple. Despite their image, the two separated in October of 1995 and were pending a divorce when Dorris ended his life in a New Hampshire motel in April of 1997. Erdrich contends that the reason that she gave up on their marriage was because she "had grown weary of supporting Dorris through his chronic depression;" he had talked of suicide "from the second year of our marriage" (Gleick 68).

Works Cited

Gleick, Elizabeth. "An Imperfect Union." Newsweek. 28 April 1997: 68-69.
Covert, Collin. "The Anguished Life of Michael Dorris." Star Tribune. 3 Aug. 1997: A1, A10-A13.

photo courtesy of Native Authors

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