Author Profile: Thomas King

            Thomas King was born on April 24, 1943 in Sacramento, California.  King’s father, Robert Elvin King, was a Cherokee, and his mother, Katheryn Konsonlas King, was of Greek and German descent.  Robert King left the family when Thomas was five, and he and his brother, Christopher, were raised by their mother in Roseville, California. After King graduated from Roseville High School, he worked at odd jobs, including those of ambulance driver and gambling croupier. In 1961 he enrolled in Sacramento State College where he stayed until he transferred to Sierra Junior College from which he graduated in 1964.  Post-graduation, King worked his way to Australia and New Zealand and was employed there as a photojournalist. He returned to the United States in 1967 and took a job as a draftsman at Boeing Aircraft in Seattle. The following year he enrolled at California State College, Chico, because his mother had gone there. He graduated in 1970, with a B.A. in English. That year he married Kristine Adams. They had a son, Christian, in 1971.

            At that point, King embarked upon a series of academic jobs, beginning as a counselor for American Indian students at the University of Utah and soon moving up to director of the new Native Studies Department. While working at Utah, he obtained an M.A. in English also from California State College and then in 1973 moved on to Humboldt State University in Arcata, California, where he was an associate dean for student services.

In 1977 King returned to the University of Utah where he worked as coordinator of the History of the Indians of the Americas project. In 1979 he moved to Canada to take a position as chair of the Native Studies Department and remained there for the next ten years. King’s marriage ended in 1981. In 1986 he received a doctorate in English and American studies from the University of Utah; his dissertation was titled “Inventing the Indian: White Images, Native Oral Traditions, and Contemporary Native Writers.” Also in the 1980’s he and his partner, Helen Hoy, had two children: Benjamin Hoy (born in 1985) and Elizabeth King (1988). 

In 1987 King began publishing short stories in magazines and anthologies. In 1989 he returned to the United States, taking a position as associate professor of American and Native studies at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. In 1990 King published his first novel, Medicine River, set at a Blackfoot reservation in Alberta, Canada, and edited All My Relations: An Anthology of Contemporary Canadian Native Fiction. In 1992 King published his first children’s book, A Coyote Columbus Story, which won the Canadian Governor-General’s Award for that year.

In 1993-1994 he took a leave of absence for the academic year to work as a story editor for the Canadian Broadcasting Company, where he wrote the teleplay for the adaptation of his novel Medicine River. Also in 1993, King published his best-known novel, the satirical Green Grass, Running Water, and a short-story collection, One Good Story, That One. In 1995 he returned to Canada with his partner and children. He took an academic appointment at the University of Guelph in Ontario.

An important figure in Native American literature, Thomas King’s primary subject in his work is cultural clash:  The American Indians, with their traditional culture and communal values, are sneered at and ignored, if not simply conquered, by the white invaders, but they triumph through wit, cleverness, and resourcefulness (often represented in King’s fiction by the figure of the trickster in American Indian lore, Coyote).   King once noted with some amusement that, because he lives and teaches in Canada, he is often called a Canadian Native writer, though he was born in the United States and those of his tribe, the Cherokee, are not native to Canada.