Laughing Boy

Oliver La Farge’s first novel, which won the Pulitzer Prize, tells of Laughing Boy, a young Navajo silversmith and horseman, and his love for Slim Girl, a woman raised away from her people at a government boarding school and marked by a harder knowledge of the white world. Their marriage draws together two ways of living, the old rhythms of the reservation and the compromises forced by contact with outsiders. La Farge, trained as an anthropologist, wrote with unusual care about Navajo custom, landscape, and belief at a time when Native lives were rarely treated seriously in American fiction. The story moves toward tragedy, yet it lingers on beauty, craft, and dignity. This free PDF and EPUB edition presents the complete novel.