He’s a rare author who has won acclaim both for “commercial” and “literary” work. It’s an ambitious undertaking that can only be carried out by someone willing to learn the craft of writing well enough to sell commercial fiction, which is one of America’s most competitive industries.Ĭonley’s long career has been distinguished by a willingness to try unconventional approaches to writing just about every kind of literature. Conley is an academic whose target audience is consciously and intentionally not restricted to an academic audience. That has allowed Conley to reach a much wider audience in his attempts to dispel some of the more damaging misconceptions about Indians, particularly Cherokees. But now, when Conley’s novels are published, they’re in Wal-Mart, and people are willing to pay to read them. But he became aware of a profound truth-that the things professors publish, mostly in the peer-reviewed academic journals, don’t reach very many people outside of academe. He had taught at quite a number of colleges and universities, in Missouri, Illinois, Iowa, and Montana, directing American Indian Studies programs at some of them. The limited reach of academic publishing was one of the frustrations that caused Conley to resign a tenured faculty appointment many years ago to become a full-time professional writer. Conley’s trail-blazing, Indian-protagonist Western novels have helped open the doors for many other Indian writers, and they reach a mass-market reading audience, one that extends far beyond the confines of academe. Conley played one of the most important pioneering roles in getting mass-market Western novels published in which Indians can be the “good guys,” whether or not the world might be ready for that.Ībout eighty books later, Conley is still cranking them out.

The commercial publishers of Westerns in New York knew they had met their match and promptly surrendered.

He wrote Strange Company, a Civil War yarn set in Indian Territory, about a couple of escaped military prisoners chained together-a Harvard College-educated Cherokee, side-kicking a semi-literate Iowa farm boy named Ben Franklin, who thought he’d been named after the first President of the United States. No, our tormented soul took that editor’s advice, and he went back to work on his trusty old typewriter.

No, we’re not talking about the guy who created the Lone Ranger and Tonto, though our tormented soul did tell that editor that what he was suggesting had already been done. Imagine a deeply frustrated Indian writer, a phone cradled to his ear, listening to his would-be editor in New York telling him that his fiction manuscript is all wrong because America isn’t yet ready for an Indian good guy in a Western novel, but maybe, maybe if he’d change the Indian to a white guy’s sidekick, maybe the editor would have another look at it.

Cherokee by Robert J. Conley