Author profile

Dee Brown

Dee Brown was an American librarian, historian and novelist whose books reconsider the American West through archival research and the experiences of people pushed outside its heroic legends.

2 published books 0 published articles

About Dee Brown

Dee Brown (1908–2002) was an American librarian, historian and novelist. Raised largely in Arkansas, he trained in library science and spent much of his career at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He wrote extensively alongside his library work, concentrating on the American West and the Civil War.

His histories challenged the triumphal version of westward expansion familiar from older textbooks and films. Brown drew on treaties, council records, autobiographies and firsthand testimony, shaping archival evidence into direct, accessible narratives. His subjects included Native nations, frontier conflict and the growth of the railroads.

Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, published in 1970, remains his defining work. Covering the years from 1860 to 1890, it recounts broken agreements, forced removals and military campaigns from a perspective centered on Native experience. The book became a national bestseller and helped change popular understanding of the American West. Brown also wrote Hear That Lonesome Whistle Blow, a history of Western railroads, as well as numerous novels and historical studies.

Begin with Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. Its movement toward the 1890 massacre at Wounded Knee gives the history a clear, grave structure, while its documentary foundation shows Brown’s strengths as both librarian and storyteller. Readers should also approach it as an influential work of its era rather than the final word on Native history.

Published books

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

Dee Brown's 1970 history retells the conquest of the American West from the side of the Native nations who lived through it. Covering roughly 1860 to 1890, it moves from the Navajo Long Walk and the Dakota war in Minnesota through Sand Creek, Red Cloud's war, the Little Bighorn, the Nez Perce flight and the Apache surrenders, and closes with the killing of Sitting Bull and the massacre at Wounded Knee in 1890. Brown builds each episode around treaty councils, speeches and recollections, so that named leaders such as Red Cloud, Cochise, Chief Joseph and Sitting Bull speak for themselves. It remains a landmark among historical non fiction books on the American West, valued for changing whose testimony counts, and best read alongside later scholarship that has refined parts of its picture.

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Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee

Dee Brown’s Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee recounts the conquest of the American West largely through the experiences and recorded words of Native peoples. Concentrating on the period from 1860 to 1890, it follows a succession of treaty negotiations, removals, wars, surrenders, killings, and reservation policies involving nations across the Plains, Southwest, Great Basin, and Northwest. Leaders including Little Crow, Red Cloud, Black Kettle, Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse, Chief Joseph, Captain Jack, and Big Foot emerge not as marginal figures in someone else’s frontier story but as political and military actors confronting invasion and dispossession. Brown ends with the killing at Wounded Knee, making it the culmination of a repeated pattern: federal promises yield to settler pressure, military force, and administrative control. Published in 1970, the book decisively challenged celebratory popular accounts of western expansion. It remains powerful and influential, though it is best read al…

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