In a 2021 interview with the
St. Cloud Times,
Sauk Rapids resident Tracy Rittmueller, the founder of the
Lyricality poets and writers organization, said, "We have literally one of the best literary cultures in the United States. It's, as far as I'm concerned, as good as New York, as good as California. We don't get the national press because we're in that flyover zone... They're just not paying attention. So I felt it was our job in Minnesota to pay attention."
Native American writers William Whipple Warren, who was born in 1825 in
La Pointe, Wisconsin, into a family of mixed
Lake Superior Ojibwe,
French Canadian, and
White Anglo-Saxon Protestant descent, moved in 1845 to the drunken and hedonistic boom town of
Old Crow Wing, Minnesota, where he worked as an interpreter for fur trader
Henry Mower Rice. Bilingual and educated in the manner of America's elite, Warren collected stories from the oral tradition of the
Ojibwe people to tell their story before and after their first encounter with
voyageurs from
New France, which Warren carefully compared against documents from French, British, and American sources. After having suffered from
tuberculosis for many years, Warren died at age 28 on June 1, 1853, and was buried in
Saint Paul. The
Minnesota Historical Society published his unfinished history in 1885.
Charles Eastman, who was born in 1858 into a family of the Santee
Dakota people in a
tepee near
Redwood Falls, Minnesota, published many literary works about the history, culture and folklore of the Dakota. He is considered one of the first Native American authors to write about
American history from a Native perspective.
Anton Treuer's 2011 book
The Assassination of Hole in the Day tells the story, based on government documents, old newspapers, and the
oral history of the
Ojibwe people, of the life of Chief
Hole in the Day and his ambush and murder by members of the Pillager Band of Ojibwe on a road near
Gull Lake, Minnesota, on June 27, 1868. On the day of his death, Hole in the Day had left his home in a horse and buggy and was on the way to Washington, D.C. to renegotiate the treaty regarding the Ojibwe's planned migration to the new
White Earth Reservation. In the meantime, he had issued orders that no
Ojibwe people were to move to White Earth until the federal government actually built everything on the reservation that it had promised in the previous treaty. The chief's murder was national news, but for decades, the reasons for it remained a mystery. The names of the assassins were known, but no one was ever charged. In 1911, the surviving assassins testified that they had been hired by a group of mobbed-up
Métis (mixed-race) businessmen and illegal whiskey peddlers led by
Clement Hudon Beaulieu, the
Democratic Party's
political boss of the region that surrounded
Old Crow Wing, Minnesota. The reason was the chief's recent vow to "use the knife's edge" to keep certain "mixed-bloods" off the new White Earth Reservation and to have them cease to receive tribal annuity payments from the federal government. While negotiating with a previous group of hired gunmen, who had demanded half their money in advance, Beaulieu had said that Hole in the Day was like a great big log and, if he was not killed, it would be impossible for Beaulieu and his confederates to get past him. According to Treuer, the assassins risked the vengeance of Hole in the Day's relatives and testified about the murder because they had come to regret their actions. Beaulieu and his confederates had kept none of the lavish promises they had made to their hired gunmen. Furthermore, Beaulieu, the other conspirators, and their families had also taken control of the government, law enforcement, and business community of the White Earth Reservation and enriched themselves by defrauding and impoverishing everyone else. Their hired assassins had grown aware, not only of Hole in the Day's ability to force the federal
bureaucracy to keep its promises to the Ojibwe people, but also of the chief's ability to keep Clement Beaulieu and his confederates in check. For these reasons, all the chief's murderers had come to mourn his absence. Treuer describes the chief's assassination as a watershed moment in the history of the Ojibwe people and argues that the aftermath of his murder was a major factor in the continuing collapse of
their language and culture.
Louise Erdrich is a
Native American author of novels, poetry, and children's books featuring Native American characters and settings. She is an enrolled citizen of the
Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians of North Dakota. Erdrich is widely acclaimed as one of the most significant writers of the second wave of the Native American Renaissance. She has written 28 books in all, including fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and children's books. Among other awards, Erdrich was awarded the 2012
National Book Award for Fiction for her novel
The Round House and the 2021
Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for her novel
The Night Watchman. She owns
Birchbark Books, a small
independent bookstore in
Minneapolis that focuses on Native American literature and the Native community in the Twin Cities.
Poetry Since the early days of settlement, Minnesota has been home to poets who wrote in English and every other language spoken by the many immigrant groups who settled in the state. The best-known English-language poets from Minnesota are
Oscar C. Eliason,
Robert Bly,
Gregory Corso,
Siri Hustvedt, and
Thomas M. Disch. The state
Poet Laureate was
Joyce Sutphen, who grew up in
St. Joseph and teaches at
Gustavus Adolphus College in
St. Peter. The current state Poet Laureate is
Gwen Westerman, who teaches at
Minnesota State University, Mankato. Although
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow never visited
Minnesota, his poem
The Song of Hiawatha is set there and is based on
Ojibwe and
Ottawa legends collected and published by
Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, on
Mary Henderson Eastman's 1849 book
Dahcotah, or Life and Legends of the Sioux Around Fort Snelling, and on an 1855 photograph of
Minnehaha Falls by
Alexander Hessler. The epic tells the story of Hiawatha, a warrior from the
Lake Superior Ojibwe, and his star-crossed love affair with
Minnehaha, a
Dakota woman. Longfellow's hero is based heavily upon the Ojibwe legends surrounding the trickster spirit
Nanabozho and also contains Longfellow's own innovations. Some locations, such as
Lake Nokomis, are named in honor of the poem. The
Dakota people called the falls "Minnehaha", which means simply
waterfall, long before the construction of
Fort Snelling, and Longfellow named
Hiawatha's wife in honor of the falls and set romantic scenes between them there. For this reason,
Minnehaha Falls remains a very popular tourist site. In
Minnesota folklore, the ghost of
Confessional poet John Berryman, who killed himself on January 7, 1972, by jumping from the
Washington Avenue Bridge in
Minneapolis onto the west bank of the
Mississippi River, is said to be seen sitting on the railing of that bridge.
German poetry written in Minnesota was often featured in the many
German-language newspapers formerly published in the state. For example, during the early years of settlement in Stearns County by German-speaking Catholic "peasant-pioneers", the valley made by the North Fork of the
Watab River was named
Schönthal ("beautiful valley"). According to local historian Coleman J. Barry, the Watab Valley's beauty inspired many works of locally composed
German poetry. Furthermore, on July 18, 1863,
Die Minnesota-Staats-Zeitung, a newspaper published by and for German-speaking
Forty-Eighters in the state, printed
An die Helden des Ersten Minnesota Regiments ("To the Heroes of the First Minnesota Regiment"), a poetic tribute to the
Union soldiers of the
1st Minnesota Infantry Regiment and their charge from
Cemetery Ridge during the
second day of the
Battle of Gettysburg. The poet was G. A. Erdman of
Hastings, Minnesota. Another important Minnesota poet who wrote in German was
Rose Ausländer, a Jewish immigrant from the
Austro-Hungarian Empire and future survivor of the
Holocaust in Romania. While living in
Minneapolis during the aftermath of
World War I, Ausländer worked as an editor for the German-language newspaper
Westlicher Herold and collaborated on the anthology
Amerika-Herold-Kalender, in which she published her first poems. While serving as a
Roman Catholic missionary to the
Ojibwe and local Irish and
German-American pioneers,
Francis Xavier Pierz wrote many works of
Slovenian poetry about his experiences.
Hieronim Derdowski, a major figure in
Polish poetry, emigrated to the United States from
Toruń in
Prussian Poland, and settled in
Winona, Minnesota, where he died and was buried in 1902. Poems were written and published in both English and Polish by
Victoria Janda, who was born in
Nowy Targ,
Austria-Hungary in 1888 and died in
Minneapolis in 1961. Among
Blue Earth County's
Welsh-American pioneers, the most highly regarded figures in local
Welsh poetry were James D. Price, whose
Bardic name was "Ap Dewi", Ellis E. Ellis, whose Bardic name was "Glan Dyfi", Edward Thomas, whose Bardic name was "Awenydd", and John I. Davis, whose Bardic name was "Ioan Idris". According to a memoir by D.M. Jones, Price (Ap Dewi) was so highly regarded by his compatriots in the state that he was urged to act as
Prifardd, or "Chief Bard", of Minnesota. In 2016, award-winning memoirist
Kao Kalia Yang, who was born in
Ban Vinai Refugee Camp in Thailand and grew up in
St. Paul, published
The Song Poet, a biography of her father,
Bee Yang, a well-known poet in the
Hmong language, cultural critic, and highly respected figure in the
Hmong-American community in and around the
Twin Cities. In the
Twin Cities and other communities such as
St. Cloud that are home to large
Somali-American communities, the composition of
Somali poetry in traditional verse forms remains a large part of
Somali culture in Minnesota. By 2017, some younger poets from the community had begun adapting traditional Somali verse forms to the rhythms of
American English and composing poems about their experiences as immigrants.
Eisteddfodau After the
Treaty of Traverse des Sioux in 1851,
Welsh immigrants settled much of what is now
Blue Earth County. The first Welsh literary society in
Minnesota was founded, according to Price, at a meeting in
South Bend Township in 1855. According to the
Mankato Free Press, the custom of local Eisteddfodau went into abeyance during the 1950s. The Blue Earth County Historical Society and the
League of Minnesota Poets made an effort to revive the tradition by in the early 21st century. During the 2006 Eisteddfod at the
Morgan Creek Vineyards in
New Ulm, adjudicator John Calvin Rezmerski awarded
Brainerd poet Doris Stengel the
Bardic Chair. After Rezmerski's death in 2016, the custom of local Eisteddfodau again fell into abeyance.
League of Minnesota Poets On February 10, 1934, 33 Minnesota poets met at the Lowry Hotel in
St. Paul and became the charter members of the newly formed
League of Minnesota Poets. Marie d’Autremont Gerry became the league's first president. Three meetings were held annually. By year's end, there were 74 members. The first two books the League published that year are Maude Schilplin's
Anthology of Minnesota Verse and Clara Clausen's
Steps in Creative Poetry. These early members endeavored "to make Minnesota poetry conscious, and conscious to its own poets." •
Susan Berman's 1981 memoir
Easy Street: The True Story of a Mob Family tells her story of growing up as the daughter of
David Berman, an
Ashkenazi Jewish immigrant from
Odessa and major
organized crime figure in both
Minneapolis and
Las Vegas. According to the memoir, David Berman ordered the murders of two Italian-American brothers whom
Chicago Outfit acting boss Al Capone had sent to organize a
Mafia family in the
Twin Cities. The brothers' murders allegedly resulted in a sit-down between Capone and Berman's protectors in
Meyer Lansky's crew of the
Luciano crime family of
New York City. Capone allegedly demanded Berman's assassination, which the New York City Jewish mobsters refused to permit. At the end of the sit-down, Capone grudgingly backed down, but vowed to have David Berman whacked if he ever visited Chicago. Berman and his crew violently attacked a Minneapolis rally of the
Silver Shirts, a
Fascist and
anti-Semitic paramilitary group financed by
Nazi Germany and modeled after
Benito Mussolini's
Blackshirts. During the attack, Berman allegedly assaulted Silver Shirts leader and founder
William Dudley Pelley, alias "The Chief", as he gave a speech calling for "an end to every Jew bastard in the city". Also, immediately after the 1947 murder of senior Lansky associate
Bugsy Siegel, David Berman and
Moe Sedway took over the running of Siegel's
casinos in Las Vegas. Since the 1981 publication of her memoir,
Susan Berman has gained far greater notoriety than her father by becoming in 2000 one of the three alleged murder victims of real estate billionaire and suspected
serial killer Robert Durst. • Gary Clayton Anderson and Alan Woolworth's 1988 anthology
Through Dakota Eyes: Narrative Accounts of the Minnesota Indian War of 1862 relates the history of the
Dakota War of 1862 through the firsthand accounts of
Dakota people, including those who experienced combat on both sides and those who, as part of a secret understanding with Minnesota State militia Colonel
Henry Hastings Sibley, rode into and took control of Chief
Little Crow's camp and rescued the surviving hostages during the
Battle of Wood Lake. •
Jeffrey Taylor's 1994 book
The Pru-Bache Murder: The Fast Life and Grisly Death of a Millionaire Stockbroker recounts the 1991 murder of Michael Prozumenshikov, a
Soviet Jewish refugee and former
Komsomol leader from
Leningrad, had come to the United States under the
Jackson-Vanik Amendment and had become a
white collar criminal who viewed his clients as a means to support his lifestyle. After defrauding every one of his many friends and neighbors, Prozumenshikov had become a detested
pariah among the otherwise close-knit
Soviet Jewish community in
St. Louis Park and the other western suburbs of
Minneapolis. Following the discovery of his headless and dismembered body in 1991, other refugees who had known him assumed that Prozumshikov had gotten involved with the
Russian Mafia and been murdered for defrauding them, too. To the shock of everyone who had known both, the St. Louis Park Police Department instead arrested and charged Zachary Persits, a previously law-abiding middle-class husband, father, and fellow Soviet Jewish refugee. As with all of his other clients, Prozumenshikov had promised to treat the Persits family's life savings as though it were his own money and then illegally boosted his commissions by putting their money in unsafe investments, which were wiped out by the
1987 stock market crash. This in turn prevented Persits's academically gifted son from being able to go to the elite private school by which he had been accepted. Despite a long history of psychological problems and his insistence that the murder was not premeditated, Persits was convicted of
first degree murder and sentenced to
life imprisonment. • Since the 1995 publication of Paul Maccabee's ''John Dillinger Slept Here: A Crooks' Tour of Crime and Corruption in St. Paul, 1920–1936'', which acts as a tour guide to the
Twin Cities' criminal underworld of the 1920s and '30s, tour buses take customers to the sites described in the book. The book describes St. Paul's Irish-American and
Democratic Party political machine, in which politicians behaved more like
Godfathers than public servants and the St. Paul Police Department behaved more like a
crime family than crime fighters. Maccabee begins with the 1928 murder by
car bombing of St. Paul
Irish mob boss
Danny Hogan, allegedly on the orders of
Jewish-American mob boss
Harry Sawyer and ends with the defeat of the
Dillinger and
Barker Gangs, the convictions on
kidnapping charges of both Sawyer and
German-American mobster Jack Pilben, and the cleansing of the police department in 1936. Maccabee's book is also uses declassified
FBI files and taped interviews to expose St. Paul Police Chief
Thomas Archibald Brown as the mastermind behind many of the most outrageously violent crimes of the
Public Enemies era. Maccabee conclusively implicates Brown for collusion with
organized crime figures Sawyer, Pilben, and
Leon Gleckman. He also outs Brown for repeatedly hiring both the Dillinger and Barker gangs to carry out multiple armed robberies and kidnappings in and around the Twin Cities. During a post office robbery committed on Brown's orders and with him promised a cut of the profits, the
Barker Gang machine-gunned to death one
South Saint Paul police officer, permanently crippled another, and then drove through downtown
South St. Paul, firing their
Thompson submachine guns at anyone and anything that moved. Maccabee writes that despite local FBI agents' obsession with getting Brown indicted and prosecuted, Brown's fellow cops were too terrified of being murdered to testify against him. All the FBI ever achieved was to cause Brown to lose his badge during a department review board hearing, after which he never again worked in law enforcement, but died a free man. • Bridget Connelly's 2003 memoir ''Forgetting Ireland: Uncovering a Family's Secret History'' relates her experiences growing up in an Irish-American farming family in
Graceville, Minnesota. Connelly also tells how she learned that her grandmother and her great-grandparents were
Irish-speaking refugees from the
Irish Famine of 1879 in
Connemara and had been brought to Minnesota and settled on their farm by Archbishop
John Ireland of the
Roman Catholic Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis, who, in Graceville lore, "was worse than
Jesse James". Connelly's family had not passed down the true story of their origins and only learned the truth during the 1980s, when a distant cousin from Ireland, who was representing the
Garda Siochana at an international
law enforcement conference in the
American South, drove to Graceville and searched out the descendants of the prosperous Minnesota relative he had grown up hearing stories about. • Elaine Davis's book
Minnesota 13 recounts the involvement of Central Minnesota German- and
Polish-American farm families in making
moonshine during
Prohibition. Davis also describes the involvement in the liquor trade of local politicians, police departments,
Roman Catholic priests, and even
Benedictine monks at
Saint John's Abbey in
Collegeville. She further reveals how high-quality locally produced moonshine, "
Minnesota 13", was sold to
Chicago Outfit boss
Al Capone,
Kid Cann, and other
organized crime figures from the
Twin Cities and beyond. Davis's book caused a boom in Central Minnesota breweries and distilleries and inspired the town of
Holdingford to begin openly celebrating this part of its past. • In December 2008,
Leo K. Thorsness, a retired
United States Air Force Colonel from
Walnut Grove, Minnesota, and veteran of the
Vietnam War, published the memoir ''Surviving Hell: A POW's Journey''. The book describes Thorsness's six years as a
prisoner of war in
North Vietnam, during which his uncooperativeness earned him a year in
solitary confinement and severe back injuries sustained during
torture. Thorsness was awarded the
Congressional Medal of Honor during his captivity, which was kept secret until after his release to prevent North Vietnamese guards from further torturing him. He was released during
Operation Homecoming on March 4, 1973. •
Kao Kalia Yang's 2008 memoir
The Latehomecomer: A Hmong Family Memoir tells the story of arriving in America from a refugee camp in
Thailand and growing up in St. Paul's large
Hmong-American community. • Tom Mahoney's 2013 book
Secret Partners: Big Tom Brown and the Barker Gang follows Maccabee's lead in investigating the Depression-era partnership between mobbed-up St. Paul Police Chief
Thomas Archibald Brown and the
Barker Gang. The book further reveals how and why, unlike other corrupt officers and every living member of the Barker Gang, Brown was able to avoid prosecution for his many capital crimes. • In his 2013 book ''Augie's Secrets: The Minneapolis Mob and the King of the Hennepin Strip'', journalist Neil Karlen, the great-grandnephew of mobbed-up Minneapolis burlesque club owner Augie Ratner, relates his family's oral history of
organized crime within Minneapolis's
Ashkenazi Jewish community. • Erik Rivenes's 2018 book
Dirty Doc Ames and the Scandal that Shook Minneapolis relates how, during his 1901–02 term, Minneapolis Mayor
A.A. Ames fired all the cops appointed by his predecessors, sold their badges to career criminals, and then ordered his new cops to enforce a
protection racket upon the city's brothels, gambling joints, and con artists for Ames's own considerable profit. Ames's resulting exposure and flight from prosecution brought Minneapolis national notoriety after
The Shame of Minneapolis, an award-winning exposé by
investigative journalist Lincoln Steffens, was published in ''
McClure's Magazine and later included in his book The Shame of the Cities''. According to Rivenes, Steffens was late onto the scene and Twin Cities' investigative journalists had already been publishing exposes of Ames's corruption from the very beginning of his last term as mayor of Minneapolis. • Shawn Francis Peters's 2018 book
The Infamous Harry Hayward: A True Account of Murder and Mesmerism in Gilded Age Minneapolis relates the story of
Harry T. Hayward, the eldest son and heir to a wealthy and cultured
White Anglo-Saxon Protestant family who were considered pillars of
Twin Cities polite society during the
Gilded Age. In a development that horrified and humiliated the many class-conscious families whose daughters he had courted, Hayward was arrested and put on trial for masterminding the
Victorian era's crime of the century: the 1894
contract killing near
Lake Calhoun of Catherine Ging, an Irish-American dressmaker,
moneylender, and occasional associate in Hayward's criminal activities.
Swedish-American triggerman Claus Blixt and Harry's younger brother Adry Hayward, who was standing up to him for the first time after a lifetime of systematic mental and emotional abuse, both testified against him. Harry Hayward was found guilty of
first degree murder and sentenced to
death by hanging. Due to his ability to dominate and manipulate others, the newspapers of the era dubbed Hayward "The
Minneapolis Svengali", "the most cold-blooded murderer that ever walked God's footstool", and "the most bloodthirsty soul ever to usurp the human frame." In the hours before his hanging at Hennepin County Jail, Hayward gave a detailed interview about his life to his cousin Edward Goodsell as a court reporter took down every word. He confessed to numerous arsons, assaults, swindles, attempted murders, and three unsolved murders in New York City, the
Sierra Madre Mountains of California, and
New Jersey. Historian and
true crime writer
Jack El-Hai has written that, if Hayward's admissions are true, then he predates Dr.
H. H. Holmes as America's first documented male
serial killer.
Fiction Minnesota has been home to many great fiction writers.
Laura Ingalls Wilder's novel
On the Banks of Plum Creek is based on her memories of living in a dugout as part of a
White Anglo-Saxon Protestant pioneer family near
Walnut Grove, Minnesota.
F. Scott Fitzgerald grew up in a wealthy, cultured "
Lace Curtain Irish" family that lived on
Summit Avenue in
St. Paul. Fitzgerald graduated from
Princeton University and became, during the
Jazz Age, a major figure in 20th century
American literature. In several of his short stories, such as "
The Ice Palace" and "
Winter Dreams", he depicts his upbringing in the
Twin Cities. Although his award-winning novel
Giants in the Earth takes place among
Norwegian-American homesteaders in
South Dakota,
Ole Edvart Rølvaag wrote both it and its sequels while a professor at
St. Olaf College in
Northfield. The Northfield
house where the author lived is now a museum. Rølvaag's novels and his own research in memoirs of Swedish settlers on the Minnesota frontier inspired Swedish author
Vilhelm Moberg to compose
The Emigrants series of four novels between 1949 and 1959. They describe a
Swedish family's emigration from
Småland to
Chisago County, Minnesota in the mid-19th century. American poet, novelist, and essayist
Siri Hustvedt grew up in Northfield, where her father,
Lloyd Hustvedt, was a professor at
St. Olaf College. She now lives in
Brooklyn, New York. Nobel Prize-winning novelist
Sinclair Lewis was born and grew up in
Sauk Centre, which he satirized as "Gopher's Prairie" in his novel
Main Street. Although the people of Sauk Centre were reportedly deeply offended by the novel, Sauk Centre now celebrates it and uses it to attract tourism. The
Stearns County Historical Society in
St. Cloud has an extensive collection of materials relating to Lewis and his family, including many taped
oral history interviews with Sauk Centre residents who knew him as a child.
Science Fiction and Fantasy The Minneapolis-Saint Paul metropolitan area is the long-standing home of several
fandom organizations such as
SF Minnesota,
MISFITS, and Mnstf, which annually hold
Diversicon,
CONvergence, and
Minicon, respectively. These are large gatherings of fans interested in science, speculative, and fantasy fiction; panels are held where authors, publishers, and scientists interact with readers, viewers, and fans of
filk music with the goal of increasing knowledge of the topics discussed. == Minnesotan Dialect ==