For over four decades now, Edward Albee has closely supervised or directed professional productions of nearly all his own plays. Among his many directing credits, he was responsible for the Broadway premieres of The American Dream (1968), Seascape (1975), and The Man Who Had Three Arms (1983), and the Broadway revival of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1976). He also staged the world premieres of Listening (1977) at the Hartford Stage Company, Marriage Play (1987) and Three Tall Women (1991) at the English Theatre in Vienna, and Fragments: A Sit-Around (1993) at the Ensemble Theatre of Cincinnati. In addition, he directed the American premieres of Counting the Ways (1977) at the Hartford Stage Company and Marriage Play at the Alley Theatre (1992) and the New York premiere of Finding the Sun (1993) at the Signature Theatre Company. For several seasons, moreover, he served as an associate director at the Tony award-winning Alley Theatre of Houston, where, in addition to staging several of his own plays, he directed Samuel Beckett's Happy Days, Ohio Impromptu, and Krapp's Last Tape. He has also directed plays by other fellow dramatists including Lanford Wilson, Sam Shepard, and David Mamet.

In several ways the following timeline is similar to previously published timelines for American Indian literature: it lists significant books in English by Native American authors (thus the 1772 beginning date) and relevant government policies, legislation, and historical, social, and cultural events. Wars are listed, not only because Indian participation in the Revolutionary and 1812 Wars was significant, but also because of the high enlistment rate among Native Americans in the twentieth century and the impact war experiences had on Indian communities. Like Gretchen Bataille’s time line in the anthology Nothing But the Truth (2001), my list includes books by non-Indians, in part because these books helped to shape popular (mis)conceptions of Indians and because Native American authors often explicitly or implicitly responded to the stereotypes popularized by works such as The Last of the Mohicans (1826), Nick of the Woods (1837), or Hanta Yo (1979).

In one significant way this timeline differs from earlier chronologies: it includes books by non-Indians that do not explicitly address Indian ” issues. I hope these inclusions will inspire (or provoke) meaningful comparative questions. For example what are the implications of the similarities and differences in war and postwar experiences as represented in novels by Momaday, Silko, and Owens and in works such as Catch 22 (1955), No-No Boy (1957) and Bless Me, Ultima (1972)? When it is placed within the contexts of imagist and modernist poetry published between 1916 and 1922, to what degree does the collection of translations Path on the Rainbow (1918) represent a celebration or an exploitation of Indian oral traditions? In 1902 both Alexander Posey and Finley Peter Dunne captured spoken dialect (Muskogee-English / Irish-English) in print. In 1903 and 1911, W. E. B. DuBois and Charles Eastman (Santee Sioux) both used the word “soul(s)“ in their titles. What do these early twentieth-century coincidences suggest about capturing the voices and spirit of marginalized groups?

My title is spoken by FAM in Albee's early short play FAM and YAM (1960), which terminates with that character's startled realization that he has just been interviewed. Albee himself has indulged in so many interviews that critics sift through his remarks for those that bolster the particular argument. I will avoid that temptation, quoting only from Albee's drama, his significant domain. Despite the source of my title, I will examine Albee's words in his published full-length plays, considered chronologically. In those plays, the very words about words in the dialogue reflect the pleasure of Edward Albee, a famous American playwright.

Albee’s early short plays already display his typical language structures and textures while they further the plot, reveal character, or enunciate theme. The Zoo Story (1959) notoriously contains Jerry’s monologal dog story as a rhythmic variant on his verbal thrusts at Peter. Jerry’s monologue exemplifies one of Albee’s main rhetorical patterns, while the other pattern is heard in Jerry’s slashes at Peter. Albee’s following one-act plays retain these dialogue structures, but the texture can vary. The Death of Bessie Smith (1960) again sports only one character with colorful language, and again that character, the Nurse, intersperses her vitriolic taunts (against Father, Orderly, Intern) with short monologues of self-disgust.2 Albee’s satiric The American Dream (1961) and The Sandbox (1960) are awash with the clich´es of middle-class America, and Grandma implies that the American family is mired in illusion.

The place: Mr. Albee's loft apartment in Tribeca, New York City.

The time: 10a.m., Friday, November 14, 2003.

Let's begin with right now. Are you currently working on any new writing?

Yes, I am. Let's see, the last thing that was done in New York - of new work - was The Goat, which is going into rehearsal next month in London, at the Almeida. And I've accepted a commission from the Hartford Stage Company to write a play to go with my play The Zoo Story. It's normally an hour long, and I have to keep approving other people's plays, or another one of my own, to be done with it. And it occurred to me that even though I was fairly happy with The Zoo Story when I wrote it, I really didn't do a full job on the character of Peter. Jerry we know very well. So I'm writing a play about Peter, before he meets Jerry, called Homelife. Peter at home with his wife, Ann, and how this affects his reaction to Jerry - to the extent that it does.

Sherman Alexie is the reigning “world heavyweight poetry bout champion” in the second generation of a Native American literary renaissance begun in the 1960s. His popular persona as a comedian, poetry bout heavyweight, experimental writer, filmmaker, and social pundit has itself become a work of art. He shares with many American Indian writers a central motif reaffirming Native lives and Native nationhood, although his direct comedic style and ironic attitude set him apart from the earnest lyricism of the now canonized elder Native writers such as N. Scott Momaday, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Louise Erdrich, and from many of his peers. Unlike many, Alexie rarely points toward the redemptive power of Native community as a direction for his protagonists' struggles. Instead, his bold, sometimes campy, style tends to affirm a more individual agency unique to Native identities, by a distinct artistic pattern of personal affirmation and reconnection. One reviewer marks an ironic balance, writing that Alexie's “dry sincerity leavens the sentiment” of his Indian tales. For all his humor, indeed in the heart of his humor, Alexie invariably circulates the grave themes of ongoing colonial history and its personal effects in Indian country. As 118-year-old Etta explains in his short story “Dear John Wayne,” “Having fun is very serious.”

At her best, Louise Erdrich spins interconnected tales of unforgettable characters; to read her works is to play an active reader-role within an elaborately structured, historically allusive universe that is rich in layered meaning. Erdrich's recurrent themes concern the ties between people and geographical locations, the importance of community among all living beings, the complexities of individual and cultural identity, and the exigencies of marginalization, dispossession, and cultural survival. Family and motherhood, storytelling, healing, environmental issues, and historical consciousness are likewise central, thematic emphases that thread Erdrich's works into the expanding web of contemporary American Indian literature.

Moreover, a cross-cultural vision registers powerfully in Erdrich’s works and originates directly within her personal experience. Erdrich is the daughter of Ojibwe and German parents. She was born 7 June 1954, to Ralph Louis and Rita Joanne (Gourneau) Erdrich in Little Falls, Minnesota. She spent much of her youth in Wahpeton, North Dakota, where her parents taught at the Wahpeton Indian Boarding School. Her maternal grandparents ran a butcher shop in Little Falls, perhaps inspiring her invention of the Kozkas in The Beet Queen (1986) and, more recently, Fidelis Waldvogel in The Master Butchers Singing Club (2003). Erdrich’s grandfather, Patrick Gourneau, was a beader, storyteller, and powwow dancer who also served as tribal chair of the Turtle Mountain Band of the Chippewa. Erdrich and her siblings were raised as Catholics, so the author of Love Medicine (1984, 1993) and other works knows firsthand the experiences of her characters whose spiritual worlds blend Ojibwen and Catholic cosmologies.

Beginning in the mid-1960s and throughout the 1970s, a new generation of American Indian writers surprised the mainstream literary establishment by publishing an unprecedented range of innovative poetry, autobiography, fiction, non-fiction, journalism, and mixed-genre works of undeniably high quality. Neither ''American literature'' nor ''American Indian literature'' would ever mean quite what they had in the past, and the assumed distinctions between these categories - written vs. oral or transcribed, sophisticated vs. primitive, familiar vs. exotic - were increasingly questioned by gifted and diverse Indian writers who not only published in all genres but, importantly, began to produce their own body of relevant scholarship. Although many individuals participated in this explosion of Native writing, it is the Kiowa and Cherokee author N. Scott Momaday who is credited with inaugurating this period as the beginning of a contemporary ''renaissance'' for American Indian literature.

Momaday’s reputation was secured in 1969, when his provocative debut novel, House Made of Dawn (1968), won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction and captured the attention of critics. For the first time, the dominant culture in the United States formally acknowledged that twentieth-century American Indians could produce a written literature that was intellectually demanding and “serious.” Early critics noted the novel’s sophisticated techniques of narration and they were intrigued by the novel’s depiction of social alienation in its Indian protagonist and his desperate need to recover a viable identity within his community. These themes resonated with non-Indian audiences of the time, and they could be labeled as “modern” and “universal” rather than exclusively “Indian.” The novel’s striking ambiguities, however, are clearly anchored in its Native contexts, and the difficulty of resolving these ambiguities has insured a steady stream of response by two generations of readers and scholars.

Since the beginning of Albee's career, his plays have been pervaded by arresting and memorable images of death. Grandma scoops sand over herself with a toy shovel as she succumbs to the smiling angel of death in The Sandbox (1960). The nurse complains that “the nigger brought a dead woman here” in The Death of Bessie Smith (1960). George makes the “flores para los muertos” allusion and reads the Catholic Requiem liturgy after the death of the imaginary son in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962). During the late 1960s and 1970s, Albee's interest in death and dying intensified, and he produced a series of plays that explored the process of dying, and the experience of the survivors who witness it, in Box and Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-Tung (1968), All Over (1971), and The Lady from Dubuque (1980). Of these plays, All Over and The Lady from Dubuque are rare twentieth-century dramas in the mode of the threnody, the funeral dirge or song of lamentation. Another decade later, in Three Tall Women (1991), Albee returned to the threnody in a very different frame of mind.

In 1969 Vine Deloria, Jr.'s (Yankton-Standing Rock Sioux) Custer Died for Your Sins appeared. In 2001 W. S. Penn (Nez Perce / Osage) published Feathering Custer. Both are witty books by talented Native American writers. Juxtaposing them suggests the rapid development of the study of American Indian literatures. One of Penn's targets is the academic literary critic, while Deloria aims at anthropologists. Why the difference? One obvious explanation is that an invisible target is hard to hit. In 1969 academics specializing in Native literatures were practically non-existent. Anthropologists (along with folklorists and historians) controlled academic Indian country. Today anthropologists, folklorists, and historians still occupy much of the territory. But the dramatic increase in the visibility of Native American literatures has inspired the growth of a substantial body of criticism worthy of recognition, praise, and, as Penn demonstrates, at times, ridicule. Since 1969 in libraries, in classrooms, and on the Internet the study of American Indian literatures has progressed from invisible to marginal to expected status.

The recognition of literature written in English by American Indians (the focus of this volume) was long overdue. The Mohegan minister Samson Occom published a best-selling sermon in 1772, which he followed in 1774 with a collection of hymns, thus initiating the significant tradition of collecting and writing hymns in English and tribal languages. Novels, poetry, essays, and autobiographies written by Native Americans have appeared since the early nineteenth century; John Joseph Mathews’s (Osage) Wah’Kon-Tah (1932) was a Book of the Month Club selection; Will Roger’s (Cherokee) syndicated New York Times columns and “correspondence” for The Saturday Evening Post reached millions of readers – despite these and many other “facts” of Native American literary production and recognition, writing by American Indians was rarely included in university literature courses before the 1970s.

Over the course of his long career, Edward Albee has experienced many ups and downs in terms of the critical reception his plays have received, but the lowest period was surely the early 1980s. Between 1980 and 1983, three new Albee plays opened on Broadway - a notable fact in itself given that he had produced only four new pieces (two of them one-acts) in the whole of the previous decade. Yet if Albee, apparently in recovery from alcoholism, was once again displaying a prolific creativity, the Broadway critics proved, for the most part, utterly unwilling to listen. Having seemingly made up their minds in advance that Albee was merely a shadow of his former self, they tore these plays to shreds as if to punish him for having the temerity to continue writing at all. The Lady from Dubuque (1980) was dismissed as “a hopeless stiff” by Variety, “really quite awful” by the New Republic, and “one of the worst plays about anything, ever,” by New York magazine.

Edward Albee has noted in his work a shift from greater to less transparency (or vice versa) from one play to the next. He has, he observes, a tendency to write from time to time in a “hermetic” fashion. Looking, as we now may, at a lifetime's work, the hermetic Albee stands out against the obviously engaged and accessible dramatist of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962) or Seascape (1975), as any playgoer or reader will easily recognize. If the distinction has latterly become less radical than it appeared with Box and Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-Tung (1968) or, to a somewhat different degree of obscurity, Tiny Alice (1964), the hermetic tendency underlies some of the most interesting characteristics of Albee's dramaturgy.

There can be no doubting Albee’s deep critical involvement in both the understanding of his own work and also with wider issues concerning new writing and the contemporary American stage. This was most evident in the aftermath of the huge success of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962). Albee, lately the Young American Playwright, now the Famous American Playwright, lacked no opportunity to convey his views in numerous interviews, one notable press conference, and also the contextual writings accompanying editions of his work. This was also a period in which he came to know personally some seminal figures in playwriting – notably Pinter and Beckett. The latter has remained a significant point of reference in Albee’s thinking and, it may be hazarded, in his work.

Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962) is Edward Albee's most affirmative play. Given the accusatorial narrative animating the play, calling this his most affirmative work may seem a bit curious. After all, George and Martha, and Nick and Honey, are characters who take delight in attacking others, in belittling those whose self-interests differ from their own, and in betraying those whose conceptions of reality differ from their own. Irony and sarcasm are born from characters who increasingly obey compulsions they seek to resist. And those compulsions have become so suffused within their language and action that these characters have devolved, in the Beckettian sense, into habit, their routines anesthetizing their responses to the self, the other, and the culture they inhabit.

Edward Albee launched his career with a series of one-act plays. As he records in the 1960 preface to one of them, The American Dream: “I have, in my brief . . . three years, five plays, two of them but fifteen minutes long.”With these five plays - The Zoo Story (1959), The American Dream (1961), and The Death of Bessie Smith (1960), plus the shorter The Sandbox (1960) and FAM and YAM (1960) - Albee is credited with changing the course of American theatre history. Many critics, including Harold Clurman from whose review I take my subtitle, greeted Albee with unbounded enthusiasm. Alan Schneider, acclaimed director of The American Dream and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962), believed Albee's early plays were the “most original and powerful work I'd come across in years.”Martin Esslin honored these breakout one-acts as the “promising and brilliant first examples of an American contribution to the Theatre of the Absurd.”

For a comprehensive bibliography consult the forthcoming expanded edition of A. LaVonne Brown Ruoff's American Indian Literatures. This brief bibliography complements mention of important titles in my Introduction and the Major secondary sources sections that follow each chapter by listing selected general bibliographies, encyclopedias, handbooks, dictionaries, histories, and introductions. I have included recent as well as decades-old reference works. By comparing old and new works, students can see how the field has developed. Other general works useful to both beginners and those more knowledgeable about American Indian literature include: (1) edited collections of essays, such as Laura Coltelli's Native American Literature (1989), Richard F. Fleck's Critical Perspectives on Native American Fiction (1993), Helen Jaskoski's Early Native American Writing (1996), Brian Swann and Arnold Krupat's Recovering the Word (1987), Allan R. Velie's Native American Perspectives on Literature and History (1995), Gerald Vizenor's Narrative Chance (1989), and Andrew O. Wiget's Critical Essays on Native American Literature (1985); (2) general collections of essay that are more personal than typical scholarly essays, such as Roger Dunsmore's Earth's Mind (1997) and Greg Sarris's Keeping Slug Woman Alive (1993); (3) broad thematic studies - for example those focusing on sense of place or region, such as Robert Nelson's Place and Vision (1993) and Eric Gary Anderson's American Indian Literature and the Southwest (1999) - or those focusing on criticism, such as Elvira Pulitano's Toward a Native American Critical Theory (2003).

In American Indian communities, elders are the revered, because we recognize them as our culture-bearers. Arguably, they give us the best long view we have of what it means to be human, since they are the ones who mark in memory where we have been and are the ones who most likely possess a collective vision we need to carry forward and the cultural values and truths that give us our identity as a people. “Elders” in that context does not necessarily refer to someone within a tribal culture who has grown to be a certain age, but instead refers to those people to whom we turn for their wisdom. “Elder” stands for influence, mentor, guide, or culture-bearer. James Welch, a writer of Pikuni (Blackfeet) and Atsina (Gros Ventre) descent, has played all of those roles in the tremendous growth period of Native American literature beginning in the 1960s. He has served as what one literary critic calls a “mediator,” because Welch links an older generation of Native writers with a new, links oral traditions with written, and links cultural survival efforts of times passed with continuing efforts.