Novelist Tony Hillerman Has Died (Pictures)

Author Tony Hillerman, 83, a mystery novelist that wrote about the Southwest has died. Read more about Tony Hillerman’s death below.

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Tony Hillerman is an accomplished author who won the 2004 Los Angeles Times Robert Kirsch Award for Lifetime Achievement. Of course this was just one of Tony Hillerman’s awards which included the Edgar and Grand Master Awards from the Mystery Writers of America, the Navajo Tribal Council’s Special Friend of the Dineh award, and an Agatha Award for his book from 2001, “Seldom Disappointed.”

Although Tony Hillerman was not Native American but was raised in rural Oklahoma and attended a Pottawatomie Indian school. In a 2002 interview, Hillerman told PBS:

When I decided I wanted to be a novelist, I had been a newspaperman for years. I didn’t know whether I could develop a plot; I didn’t know if I could develop a character. I knew I could describe. I thought, I’ll set it on a Navajo reservation so I’ll have a good background. If they don’t like the story, they can look at the state setting, you know? That’s how I got started. The more I knew about [the Navajo], the better I liked them.

When Hillerman was interviewed by “The Rake” about what he wanted his readers to take away from his books, he stated:

Above all I would like them to be aware that the cultures of the people I like to write about, the Navajos and Hopis and so forth, are extremely complicated and extremely interesting — and in the case of the Navajos especially, are extremely valuable. You can learn a heck of a lot from Hopi and Navajo ways of life. For example, the negative value they put on greed, of having more than you need. In their mythology, that’s how you identify a witch, the ultimate of evil. They have more than one kind of what we call a witch, they don’t use that word. And the fellow who’s got money and stuff, and kinfolks who are hungry, it’s an almost certain sign the guy’s evil. We’ve sort of left that behind us. We think the homeless person is probably a crook, or dangerous.

Hillerman enjoyed his life as a writer for over 20 years and said:

…you really had to sort of take a vow of poverty to be a journalist in the old days. … I really think working at a newspaper as a reporter has two huge advantages for writers. One, you’re writing every day. You learn how to use the language, you learn how to get a paragraph to make sense if you’re doing it every day. And also it puts you where the action is, where you’re seeing the guy sitting in the defendant’s box sweating out the jury. You’re at the scene of the crime, you’re at the scene of the train wreck, you’re dealing with people that are under tension, and I just think you can get a whole head full of memories of people and things. I wonder sometimes how normal people come up with their good books.

Our condolences to the family and friends of Tony Hillerman.

Images: PR

Source: news

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