Silko is one of the major authors to emerge from the Native American literary renaissance of the 1970s. Born in 1948 in Albuquerque, New Mexico, she grew up on the nearby Laguna Pueblo Reservation, where she was raised within a family of mixed Indian, Mexican, and white descent. Life on the reservation was a daily balancing act of Pueblo and Christian ways. Storytelling, or story-sharing, was an important part of Pueblo culture, and Silko grew up listening to stories of the Indians' struggles and their survival as a people. The stories lived on in her memory, and in later years she drew heavily upon her heritage in her writings.

She majored in English at the University of New Mexico because, as she put it, "I loved to read and write about what I'd read." Silko graduated magna cum laude in 1969, the same year she published "The Man...