Laughing Boy

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize: “A romantic idyll played out in the rhythms and meanings of a vanished Navajo world.” —The Denver Post

Written in 1929 by the anthropologist Oliver La Farge, Laughing Boy offers an intimate glimpse into the Navajo culture of the southwestern United States. In lyrical prose and with soaring descriptions of the landscape and its people, the book captures a romance between two young Navajos caught in a rift between the past and the present, between an alienating American world and the vanishing community of the clans.

While attending a ceremonial dance, Laughing Boy finds himself distracted by the lovely Slim Girl. Educated in American schools and the subject of coarse rumors, she is regarded by his family as an unsuitable wife. But their protestations are unable to sway Laughing Boy from his path. He and Slim Girl elope.

Through Laughing Boy’s jewelry-making and horse-trading and Slim Girl’s blanket weaving, they live in relative prosperity on the outskirts of an American town. As the distance from Laughing Boy’s T’o Tlakai home seems to grow ever farther, the modern world encroaches upon them, revealing in whispers its treachery and corruption . . .

“[A novel of] lucid beauty, vital artistic imagination, and a clear, almost hypnotic style.” —The New York Times

“A seminal book . . . Most of us read Laughing Boy when we were young and were awakened to the splendor of a new material for the American novel.” —Jim Harrison, bestselling author of Legends of the Fall

“A daring experiment, triumphantly successful . . . The tale is haunting and poetic in an extraordinary degree.” —Owen Wister, author of The Virginian