Laughing Boy

2025 Reprint of the 1929 Edition. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize: "A romantic idyll played out in the rhythms and meanings of a vanished Navajo world." -The Denver Post

La Farge's enduring American classic and first novel captures the essence of the Southwest in 1915. At a ceremonial dance, the young, earnest silversmith Laughing Boy falls in love with Slim Girl, a beautiful but elusive "American" educated Navajo. As they experience all of the joys and uncertainties of first love, the couple must face a changing way of life and its tragic consequences.

"A seminal book... Most of us read Laughing Boy when we were young and were awakened to the splendor of a new material for the American novel."- Jim Harrison, author of Legends of the Fall

"A daring experiment, triumphantly successful... The tale is haunting and poetic in an extraordinary degree.'- Owen Wister, author of The Virginian

"Compelling in its strength and simplicity, and in its fidelity to the deepest impulses of human nature."- NEW YORK TIMES

Oliver La Farge (1901-1963) first traveled to Navajo territory on a Harvard archaeological expedition. Laughing Boy, his first novel, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1930 as the book that best presented "the whole atmosphere of American life"; it was the first novel about Native American life to receive the prize.