Sherman Alexie's second-floor Seattle office is bordered by redwoods and cedar and has three pieces of art on the walls. Two of them are what you would expect. One is the original artwork from his second short-story collection, First Indian on the Moon. The other is a signed and framed print of the poem "Thanksgiving at Snake Butte" by the pre-eminent Indian author James Welch, one of Alexie's literary heroes. 

Then there's the black-and-white photograph to the left of his desk. It's a portrait of Kurt Cobain, the grunge-rock superhero who revitalized the moribund early-'90s pop-culture scene with his band Nirvana and then, in 1994, killed himself with a shotgun blast to the head. The photo is a surprise at first, but then you realize it fits. The sense of being an outsider, the anger, the motivation. Seattle. 

"He saved us all," Alexie says. "He came and blew away all that shit that was going on." 

Alexie isn't as famous as Cobain, but he wants to be. He started as what he likes to call "a small literary writer from Seattle," but he was remarkably prolific and had an appetite for success. His college writing professor, Alex Kuo, once said that he probably had ten students with more talent than Alexie. But Alexie, Kuo said, "had a dedication that other students with perhaps more talent didn't have." 

That dedication has paid off. One year after he graduated from college in 1991, two books of his poetry were published, I Would Steal Horses and The Business of Fancydancing, and as the legend goes, their acceptance prompted him to kick five years of debilitating drinking in one night. He has since published five more books of poetry. His first book of prose, a short-story collection titled The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, was published in 1993, and he followed in 1995 with his first novel, Reservation Blues. Indian Killer came out a year later and became a New York Times Notable Book. Then he devoted his time to producing the 1998 film Smoke Signals and working on his new collection, The Toughest Indian in the World. Along the way, he won awards from PEN, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Ernest Hemingway Foundation and many others. In 1998 and 1999, he was named by both Granta and The New Yorker as one of the best American fiction writers under forty. He has been embraced by Hollywood, as well—he is now working on three screen adaptations of novels, including his own Reservation Blues. And he won both the 1998 and 1999 World Heavyweight Championship Poetry Bout at the Taos Poetry Circus in New Mexico. 

* * * 

"I identify strongly with him," Alexie says of Cobain. "Small-town guy, poor, makes himself into this huge rock star." 

Alexie was born just six months before Cobain, a couple of hundred scrub-brush miles away from Cobain's tiny hometown of Aberdeen, on the 150,000-acre Spokane Indian Reservation in eastern Washington. Like Cobain, his antipathy toward the social and racial oppression of mainstream America drove much of his early work. With Alexie's success, though, he has begun moving beyond his early, anger-driven prose into a kind of mythopoetic writing style, which has come stridently into focus with The Toughest Indian in the World. 

Concurrently, Alexie—though he describes himself as an introvert—has purposefully developed a fast-talking, highly entertaining onstage comic persona. At public appearances, he embarks on quick-witted monologues, taking serious aim at pretty much every race he can, but reserving a disproportionate amount of attention for what he calls "crazy white people." He gleefully targets New Age white women who "come floating onto the reservation healing everything in their path" and jokes about white people who expect him to read coyote stories, speak in a slow monotone and "stare off into the distance as if constantly receiving visions." 

Alexie memorizes his own stories and then acts them out, improvising new lines along the way, making the reading into a kind of free-form Beat performance. He has developed this side of his work, he says, specifically to further his career and in part because he was often turned off by writers who appeared live and read their work, no matter how brilliant, with a monotone delivery. "I care about my writing so much, and I'm so involved in it and so emotionally connected to it, and I want that passion, that caring, that hatred of it, that incredible relationship I have with my own work, I want people to know about that," he says. "I want them to feel it when I'm up in front of them talking about what I do." 

It's all undertaken to accomplish one central goal, he says, and that is to get his books read by twelve-year-old reservation kids, who, like him, grew up either with heroes who had been created by the white media or no heroes at all. "In order for the Indian kid to read me," Alexie says, "pop culture is where I should be. Literary fiction is very elitist. The fifteen or twenty thousand literary-book buyers in this country, I'm very happy for them, and I'm happy they buy my books, by and large. But there is a whole other population out there I want to reach. And so for me, what kind of art can I create that gets to them? I don't want to have an elitist career. I've won awards, I've gotten a lot of attention, I've been in The New Yorker, I'm very happy with all that. I'm very proud. But I would consider myself a failure if more people didn't read me. I'd rather be accessible than win a MacArthur." 

With the success, of course, it's become harder and harder for Sherman Alexie to live up to the image the public has of him as the toughest Indian writer in the world. Both whites and Indians come at him with expectations. He butts up against these expectations and complains about them vociferously, at the same time using them to his advantage. There have been few Indian writers with the kind of mainstream ambitions as Alexie, and he's the first to admit that he has worked the Indian angle for all it's worth. "It's a really crowded world out there, and everybody is clamoring for attention and you use what you've got," he says. "And what I've got that makes me original is that I'm a rez boy." 

* * * 

Alexie's father is Coeur d'Alene Indian, and his mother is Spokane Indian. One of six siblings, he was born October 7, 1966, in the tiny reservation town of Wellpinit. Soon after his birth, he was diagnosed with hydrocephalus, a condition in which expanding cranial fluid puts too much pressure on the brain. At six months old, Alexie underwent drastic surgery. The doctors told his parents that if he survived at all, which was doubtful, he would most likely be mentally handicapped. As a result of the surgery, he dealt with seizures and uncontrollable bed-wetting late into childhood, eventually becoming what he describes as a math geek who played Dungeons and Dragons by himself in the basement. He was smart and tall, though, so he went to Reardan, a white high school, where he played on the basketball team and was the only real Indian on the Reardan Indians. He went on to college at Washington State University in Pullman and, after taking a writing class, gave up his pre-med plans. 

On May 15, Alexie returned to Auntie's Bookstore in Spokane, the place he had gone to buy books and games as a child. This time he was there to give a reading, and he read the story "Dear John Wayne" from his new book. In the third row sat his mother and father, two brothers, two sisters and two nieces. There were people he had known from all periods of his life, childhood, college and adulthood in Seattle. There was the woman who worked at the Safeway near his crummy apartment in college, whom he would see every day when he went to the grocery store, counting his pennies along the way, to buy something to eat. Seeing her was a symbolic moment, he says. "I had this big crush on her, and I never told her. Now I can tell her." 

In other words, Alexie has arrived. There were five hundred people at that reading, and another couple of hundred had to be turned away. Success kills some pop stars, but it's bringing Alexie to life—in some ways, making him larger than life. 

The success of Smoke Signals certainly helped. Cobbled together from situations and characters first developed in The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven—primarily from the story "This is What It Means to Say Phoenix, Arizona"—it is a road-trip movie about Northwest Indians Victor Joseph and Thomas Builds-A-Fire, who drive to the Southwest to take possession of the ashes of Victor's dead father. Alexie wrote the screenplay and produced the movie, which was picked up by Miramax after winning the Audience Award and the Filmmakers Trophy at the 1998 Sundance Film Festival. It became the first Indian-produced, Indian-directed, Indian-written feature film ever distributed in the United States. And as Alexie likes to point out, "The Indians weren't played by Italians with long hair." 

It also showed Alexie the cultural power of film, something he never experienced with his books, and that gave him his biggest taste yet of the pop-culture presence he desires. "Thomas Builds-a-Fire, the character, has become a huge cultural character in the Indian world," Alexie says. "I get photographs of Indian kids who dressed as him for Halloween. His lines in the movie have become pop-cultural phrases. In the Indian world, we just don't have that. Our heroes have always been guys with guns. And now, to have this cultural hero who is this androgynous little storytelling bookworm geek—I think that's wonderful." 

His fiction has since become bigger, more daring, more surreal. He now traffics in huge metaphors and characters that engage in strange, archetypal and at times wildly desperate bids for intimacy or a sense of personal context. As such, The Toughest Indian in the World has elicited wildly divergent appraisals. While The New Yorker has given it a kind of ueberblessing by running two of the book's stories in the past year, The New York Times panned it. Publishers Weekly gave it a starred review, stating "Alexie's stories continually surprise, revealing him once again as a master of his craft." But others have accused him of fashioning those same surprises just for effect. 

In Toughest Indian, there is a road-trip story, "South by Southwest," similar in many key ways to Smoke Signals, but Victor and Thomas have been replaced by a nutty white guy named Seymour and a fat Indian that Seymour nicknames Salmon Boy. They kiss in the front seat of a 1965 Chevrolet Malibu on their way to a McDonald's in Tucson, Arizona. In Alexie's preceding work, the novel Indian Killer, there was no kissing going on between Indians and white guys. There wasn't even any handshaking. An Indian guy was mutilating white guys with a knife and leaving owl feathers on their bodies. 

Seymour and Salmon Boy meet when Seymour attempts to rob a pancake house, Pulp Fiction-style. He takes $42 in change from the customers and then says he needs someone to go with him to Arizona, someone who will fall in love with him along the way. Salmon Boy is the only volunteer. 

"Are you gay?" Seymour asks. "I'm not gay." 

"No sir, I am not a homosexual," Salmon Boy says. "I am not a homosexual, but I do believe in the power of love." 

Alexie carries out the story, as he carries out all of the stories in the book, with his own brand of magic realism, as if these weren't modern short stories at all, but indigenous folk tales that have been passed down through the ages. He mixes mythic references to salmon and constellations with the tragedies and foibles of real Indian life, with all of its juxtapositions, misunderstandings and occasional victories. He weaves in and out of Indian stereotypes, setting them up, teasing the reader with them, destroying them, and then being courageous enough to refer back to them again, as if, within the weave of what is thought to be true of pre-colonial Indians and what you see of today's Indians, lies the ultimate truth. It's a trickster sleight of hand that messes with reality and allows Alexie to get away with stories that feel purposefully timeless. 

* * * 

Alexie does a lot of his writing at 3 a.m. at the International House of Pancakes in the university district of Seattle, close to his office and not too far from his home, where he lives with his wife, Diane, a college counselor and Hidatsa Indian, and their five-year-old son. He has been an insomniac since he was a child. In those days, he would play games. Now, when he's up late, he writes. When he's not traveling, his Seattle life is quiet—he is limited to the writing he does during the day, at an office shared with an assistant he has known since college. He spends time with his family in the evenings and meets up with his buddies for basketball every Tuesday after work. 

He says all of his stories are born out of a central image that expands as he writes, and the image for Seymour and Salmon Boy came one night at the IHOP. "An Indian and a white guy walked in together, and they were obviously great friends," he recalls. "They were laughing and a little intoxicated and not sloppy or obnoxious, just having a great time. And they looked so sweet together. They weren't lovers, there was none of that energy, but they seemed so close and so intimate with each other that it was really touching." 

Homosexuality informs many of the stories in The Toughest Indian in the World. The title story is about an Indian journalist who picks up an Indian boxer hitchhiking. The tired, conflicted writer is in awe of what he perceives as the fighter's mythic purity. "You'd have been a warrior in the old days, enit?" the journalist says. "You would've been a killer. You would've stole everybody's horses." The story explodes, though, when they share a hotel room and, late at night, the fighter—who, it turns out, is gay—climbs into the writer's bed and coaxes the journalist into a new experience. 

"I'm becoming more urban and also spending more and more time in the art world, which, you know, is heavily populated by homosexuals," Alexie says. "So simply, my experiences have grown, so the characters represented in my fiction will grow accordingly. And one of the things, one of the hatreds that bothers me the most is homophobia. So in some sense I wanted to use my fiction as a way of addressing that directly. And celebrating [homosexuality] in all of its forms. And including it as just another aspect of love." 

Love? From the guy who still talks about his fantasies of killing the white guys who sat in the back row of his high-school classes? "A couple of the reviews found the story cynical or a parody. And I meant it to be a very sweet story," he says. "I was trying to do that. It is certainly difficult for anybody to love anybody, but we usually do OK. These aren't happy stories necessarily. But I think they are positive stories." 

If this isn't the kind of thing one would expect from Alexie, well, he's fine with that. "I always want to be a moving target," he says. 

That quality may stem from a certain sense of personal protectionism. In the crowd at Auntie's Bookstore, a lot of his old acquaintances from the reservation were on hand, and some were most decidedly not supporters of his work. Alexie has been dogged throughout his career by accusations from those at the reservation who say that he is selling them up the river, misrepresenting reservation life for his own gain, embarrassing them. "The word that keeps coming back is responsibility," Alexie says. "They ask me to represent them, until the point where I'm not an artist. I'm a politician, or not even that, a propagandist. I'm supposed to be making public-service announcements, rather than creating art. And I hate that. That kind of pressure is terrible." 

At one point after his reading, a reservation Indian woman approached the microphone in the crowd. Alexie said later he had been estranged from her since age nine. "Old long feuds over old long things," he said. The woman asked why, instead of shooting fictional narrative film like Smoke Signals, he didn't film a documentary about the reservation, so that the American public could see "how it really is." 

A few minutes later, a white man approached the mike and asked, "Do you hate white people?" 

These questions follow Alexie wherever he goes. And he's not going to escape them, because what they both spring from informs who he has made himself to be—an Indian writer. It is both his reason to write and what he battles most strongly against. Every single one of the stories in his new book is about Indians and whites trying to overcome the stereotypes of who and what they are supposed to be. And that's Alexie's own challenge these days. 

On his book jackets in the past, Alexie has worn the same stoic too-cool-for-school Indian mask that he himself makes fun of. He calls it "the ethnic stare." On his new book, though, we see a man without the mask. He wears a look of concern, but also of gentleness, vulnerability and, ultimately, pride. It was taken by Rex Rystedt, the same Seattle photographer who took the Cobain portrait on his wall. One looks at the image and wonders, Is this the introvert? Or the guy who becomes the Indian Richard Pryor on stage? The insomniac scratching out verse at 3 a.m. in the Seattle IHOP? Or the screenwriter who takes lunch at Sunset Strip cafes? The poor rez boy who enjoys the power and privilege he once railed against? The guy who started as a outsider poet? Or the one who now wants to be a mainstream pop-culture icon? A man who may not be telling the whole truth about the modern American Indian but is at least telling his own? 

Sherman Alexie defied expectations from his first breath. Now, he does it for the American literary world and, increasingly, the American public, as well.