Tony Hillerman Bio.pdf

an a local store. Hillerman loved reading and books as a youth, and in those
days before television and without even enough money for batteries for the radio,
he also formed an appreciation for oral storytelling. He would listen to the men
who gathered at his parents' store to tell stories and tall tales, and learned
pacing, timing, and the importance of detail. Hillerman's youth was thus spent, as
Muhlestein noted, "poor in money but rich in the tools of a future writer."
Hillerman also learned, according to Muhlestein, "what it meant to be an
outsider," by attending a boarding school for Potawatomie Indian girls. Doubly
removed because of both race and gender, Hillerman internalized this feeling of
being an outsider, but also formed a deep and abiding respect for Indian ways
and culture. As important as that message was, he also learned another: the
significance of class in America. As a youngster Hillerman viewed himself as a
country boy, one who got his haircuts at home, not at a barber shop. If the world
were divided into urban and rural, he would opt for the latter.
After graduating from high school, Hillerman began college at Oklahoma State
University, but then joined the army to fight in World War II. He took part in the D-
Day landings, was wounded in Alsace, and earned a Silver Star, among other
decorations. His letters home, which found their way into the hands of a
journalist, were so detailed and spirited that the newspaperman convinced the
young returning soldier to take up a career in writing.
Enrolling in journalism courses, Hillerman also worked part-time to support his
education. It was in 1945, while driving a truckload of drilling pipe from Oklahoma
to New Mexico, that he first encountered the Navajo and their reservation. The
Navajos he first saw were engaged in a curing ceremony called the Enemy Way,
during which a young Navajo fresh from service in the war, like Hillerman himself,
was being cured of the foreign contamination and brought back into harmony
with his own people. "When I met the Navajos I now so often write about,"
Hillerman recalled to Ernie Bulow in Talking Mysteries, "I recognized kindred
spirits. Country boys. More of us. Folks among whom I felt at ease." In 1948,
Hillerman graduated from the journalism program at the University of Oklahoma.
He was also married that year to Marie Unzner; the couple would eventually have
one child together and adopt five additional children.
Hillerman took several newspaper jobs in and around Oklahoma, Texas, and
New Mexico before joining the staff of the Santa Fe New Mexican in 1954. He
stayed with that paper until 1963, working at the end of his journalism career as
executive editor. But he had a longing to become a novelist, and with the
encouragement of his wife, left journalism behind to study writing, soon becoming
a journalism professor at the University of New Mexico, where he remained until
1985. It was while he was a professor of journalism that he wrote his first novel,
The Blessing Way, in which he introduces Joe Leaphorn, a fiftyish Navajo with
the Tribal Police on the reservation. Leaphorn, however, was almost cut out of
this manuscript at the urging of Hillerman's agent. Finally, an editor at Harper &
Row wrote an enthusiastic critique of the manuscript, wanting Hillerman to
increase Leaphorn's role, and the writer's first major protagonist was born.
In this debut novel, the motive for the murder of a young Navajo is witchcraft in
the shape of a Navajo Wolf, akin to a werewolf. According to Geoff Sadler, a