Bury My heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West.

BROWN, Dee.

Item Number: 126177

New York : Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1970.

First edition of this landmark work. Octavo, original cloth, illustrated with 49 black and white reproductions of photographic portraits of Native Americans. Presentation copy, inscribed by the author on the front free endpaper, “For [Bob Terrell] Dee Brown, Asheville 1988.” Terrell was an author and newspaperman who supplied his name in the inscription. NB: This copy was used in a review of the book in the Asheville Citizen in 1971. The photograph of Chief Standing Bear on page 361 was employed in the review and was excised from the book and then reinserted as pictured here. Near fine in a near fine dust jacket. Signed first editions are decidedly scarce.

First published in 1970, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee is Dee Brown's eloquent, meticulously documented account of the systematic destruction of American Indians during the second half of the nineteenth century. A national bestseller in hardcover for more than a year after its initial publication, it has sold almost four million copies and has been translated into seventeen languages. Using council records, autobiographies, and firsthand descriptions, Brown introduces readers to great chiefs and warrors of the Dakota, Ute, Sioux, Cheyenne, and other tribes, revealing in heartwrenching detail the battles, massacres, and broken treaties that methodically stripped them of freedom. A forceful narrative still discussed today as revelatory and controversial, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee permanently altered our understanding of how the American West came to be defined. Praised by Pulitzer Prize winning Native American author N. Scott Momaday who called the book "extraordinary on several accounts ... [a] narrative of singular integrity and precise continuity."