Karl Kroeber,Artistry in Native American myths. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998. Pp. xii, 292. Hb $35.00, pb $12.00.

Abstract

Karl Kroeber is a distinguished professor of English at Columbia University and the son of a distinguished anthropologist, Alfred Louis Kroeber. He has been listening to Native American stories since his boyhood, and writing about them (side by side with his work on the English Romantics) for roughly twenty years. An anthology he edited in 1981, Traditional American Indian literatures: Texts and interpretations, taught me much when it appeared, and a statement Kroeber made in the introduction to that volume has stayed with me ever since. “It is our scholarship,” he wrote, “not Indian literature, which is primitive or underdeveloped.”