Alexie was born to Salish Indians—a Coeur d’Alene father and a Spokane mother. He suffered from congenital hydrocephalus and underwent surgery when he was six months old. Though the procedure did not affect his ability to learn, he suffered harsh side effects, including seizures, in his childhood. As a boy, he was much influenced by his maternal grandmother, a spiritual leader of the Spokane, who died when he was eight. Because of his health, he was unable to compete physically, so he became instead an avid reader. He went off the reservation to attend an all-white high school, where he was an honour student and class president. His experiences there later fueled a young-adult novel, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (2007), which won a National Book Award for Young People’s Literature. He earned a scholarship to Spokane’s Gonzaga University, where he studied for two years (1985–87) and began drinking heavily. He later graduated from Washington State University (B.A., 1991) and credited a poetry course he took there with helping him find his voice as a writer.
Alexie’s first book was a volume of poetry, I Would Steal Horses (1992). Shortly after its publication he quit drinking. The same year, he produced The Business of Fancydancing, a book combining prose and poetry. A prolific writer, he published in 1993 two more books of poetry—First Indian on the Moon and Old Shirts & New Skins—and The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, a collection of interwoven stories that won the PEN/Hemingway Award for best first book of fiction.
Reservation Blues (1995) was Alexie’s first novel. In it he posited a visit by blues legend Robert Johnson to Big Mom (a character based on Alexie’s own grandmother) as a means of examining life on the reservation and the issues facing Indians—a term Alexie preferred to “Native Americans,” which he considered an oxymoronic term born of white guilt.
Alexie followed this in 1996 with another volume of poetry, The Summer of Black Widows, and the thriller Indian Killer. His stories in The Toughest Indian in the World (2000) won him the PEN/Malamud Award for excellence in short-story writing, and the story “What You Pawn I Will Redeem”—published first in The New Yorker in 2003 and later in the collection Ten Little Indians (2003)—also won prizes. The 2007 novel Flight centres on a teenage orphan who travels through time, viewing moments of historical and personal significance through the eyes of others. Blasphemy (2012) collected new and previously published short stories. Alexie also contributed writing on a variety of subjects to the Seattle weekly The Stranger.
In 2017 Alexie released the memoir You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me, in which he chronicled his complicated relationship with his mother. The book was well received, and in February 2018 it was named the winner of the American Library Association’s Carnegie Medal for nonfiction. Shortly thereafter, however, allegations of sexual misconduct against Alexie were made public, and he declined the award. He issued a statement in which he admitted to doing things that had harmed people and apologized to those he had hurt.
In addition to writing books, Alexie was involved in filmmaking. He wrote the screenplay for and produced Smoke Signals (1998), based on the story “This Is What It Means to Say Phoenix, Arizona” from The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven. He also wrote a screenplay for and directed The Business of Fancydancing, based loosely on his book of the same name. Alexie collaborated with others to write music for his movies as well. Noted for his frankness, quick wit, and mordant sense of humour, he was a popular speaker and performer, and he appeared on such television programs as The Colbert Report.
In 2010 Alexie won a number of literary awards, including the PEN/Faulkner Award for War Dances (2009; another mix of prose and poetry) and the 2010 Lifetime Achievement Award from the Native Writers’ Circle of the Americas.
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