Joe Jackson at Prince Books

Joe Jackson

Black Elk: The Life of an American Visionary 

Author Presentation & Book Signing 7:00 PM

  Wednesday, November 2, 2016

Black Elk: The Life of an American Visionary, the first exhaustive biography of the Sioux holy man. Drawing on new research, including interviews with members of Black Elk’s family who have never spoken to biographers before, Jackson dives into the historical, personal, and spiritual dimensions of a man regarded by many as one of the most important members not only of his tribe, but of American religious life.

Black Elk’s life was entwined with some of the most important and fateful encounters between whites and Native Americans in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries — he was present at Little Big Horn, at the death of his cousin Crazy Horse, and at Wounded Knee. He traveled with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show to Europe, where he performed for Queen Victoria. Returning home, his attempt to safeguard the spiritual practices of the Lakota met with mixed results, and he eventually converted to Catholicism. Throughout the book, Jackson provides vivid period detail to give context while showing the desperate, sometimes doomed lengths to which Black Elk would go to save his people’s culture from Western expansion.

Joe Jackson is the author of six works of nonfiction and one novel, including, most recently, Atlantic Fever: Lindbergh, His Competitors, and the Race to Cross the Atlantic (FSG, 2012). His book The Thief at the End of the World: Rubber, Power, and the Seeds of Empire was named one of Time’s top 10 Nonfiction Books of 2008. He is the Mina Hohenberg Darden Endowed Professor of Creative Writing in the M.F.A. creative writing program at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia