If the nineteenth century was not the Golden Age of utopianism, it was certainly a golden age. All three major 'faces of utopia', to borrow Lyman Tower Sargent's phrase, flourished: literary utopias, non-fictional utopian social theory, and intentional communities. This Cambridge Companion highlights one of the 'three faces' - the literary utopia. My working definition of a literary utopia is a fairly detailed narrative description of an imaginary culture - a fiction that invites readers to experience vicariously an alternative reality that critiques theirs by opening intellectual and emotional spaces that encourage readers to perceive the realities and potentialities of their cultures in new ways. If the author and/or readers perceive the imaginary culture as being significantly better than their 'present' reality, then the work is a literary eutopia (or more commonly, a utopia); if significantly worse, it is a dystopia. Within this definitional framework, an overview of the nineteenth century could have an especially narrow chronological focus, since there is a general consensus that for most of the century utopian social theory and communal experiments thrived, but only in the final years of the century did literary utopias flourish. There is ample evidence to support this claim from North America to Great Britain, Europe, Australia, New Zealand and Asia.

In several ways the following timeline is similar to previously published timelines for American Indian literature: it lists significant books in English by Native American authors (thus the 1772 beginning date) and relevant government policies, legislation, and historical, social, and cultural events. Wars are listed, not only because Indian participation in the Revolutionary and 1812 Wars was significant, but also because of the high enlistment rate among Native Americans in the twentieth century and the impact war experiences had on Indian communities. Like Gretchen Bataille’s time line in the anthology Nothing But the Truth (2001), my list includes books by non-Indians, in part because these books helped to shape popular (mis)conceptions of Indians and because Native American authors often explicitly or implicitly responded to the stereotypes popularized by works such as The Last of the Mohicans (1826), Nick of the Woods (1837), or Hanta Yo (1979).

In one significant way this timeline differs from earlier chronologies: it includes books by non-Indians that do not explicitly address Indian ” issues. I hope these inclusions will inspire (or provoke) meaningful comparative questions. For example what are the implications of the similarities and differences in war and postwar experiences as represented in novels by Momaday, Silko, and Owens and in works such as Catch 22 (1955), No-No Boy (1957) and Bless Me, Ultima (1972)? When it is placed within the contexts of imagist and modernist poetry published between 1916 and 1922, to what degree does the collection of translations Path on the Rainbow (1918) represent a celebration or an exploitation of Indian oral traditions? In 1902 both Alexander Posey and Finley Peter Dunne captured spoken dialect (Muskogee-English / Irish-English) in print. In 1903 and 1911, W. E. B. DuBois and Charles Eastman (Santee Sioux) both used the word “soul(s)“ in their titles. What do these early twentieth-century coincidences suggest about capturing the voices and spirit of marginalized groups?

In 1969 Vine Deloria, Jr.'s (Yankton-Standing Rock Sioux) Custer Died for Your Sins appeared. In 2001 W. S. Penn (Nez Perce / Osage) published Feathering Custer. Both are witty books by talented Native American writers. Juxtaposing them suggests the rapid development of the study of American Indian literatures. One of Penn's targets is the academic literary critic, while Deloria aims at anthropologists. Why the difference? One obvious explanation is that an invisible target is hard to hit. In 1969 academics specializing in Native literatures were practically non-existent. Anthropologists (along with folklorists and historians) controlled academic Indian country. Today anthropologists, folklorists, and historians still occupy much of the territory. But the dramatic increase in the visibility of Native American literatures has inspired the growth of a substantial body of criticism worthy of recognition, praise, and, as Penn demonstrates, at times, ridicule. Since 1969 in libraries, in classrooms, and on the Internet the study of American Indian literatures has progressed from invisible to marginal to expected status.

The recognition of literature written in English by American Indians (the focus of this volume) was long overdue. The Mohegan minister Samson Occom published a best-selling sermon in 1772, which he followed in 1774 with a collection of hymns, thus initiating the significant tradition of collecting and writing hymns in English and tribal languages. Novels, poetry, essays, and autobiographies written by Native Americans have appeared since the early nineteenth century; John Joseph Mathews’s (Osage) Wah’Kon-Tah (1932) was a Book of the Month Club selection; Will Roger’s (Cherokee) syndicated New York Times columns and “correspondence” for The Saturday Evening Post reached millions of readers – despite these and many other “facts” of Native American literary production and recognition, writing by American Indians was rarely included in university literature courses before the 1970s.

For a comprehensive bibliography consult the forthcoming expanded edition of A. LaVonne Brown Ruoff's American Indian Literatures. This brief bibliography complements mention of important titles in my Introduction and the Major secondary sources sections that follow each chapter by listing selected general bibliographies, encyclopedias, handbooks, dictionaries, histories, and introductions. I have included recent as well as decades-old reference works. By comparing old and new works, students can see how the field has developed. Other general works useful to both beginners and those more knowledgeable about American Indian literature include: (1) edited collections of essays, such as Laura Coltelli's Native American Literature (1989), Richard F. Fleck's Critical Perspectives on Native American Fiction (1993), Helen Jaskoski's Early Native American Writing (1996), Brian Swann and Arnold Krupat's Recovering the Word (1987), Allan R. Velie's Native American Perspectives on Literature and History (1995), Gerald Vizenor's Narrative Chance (1989), and Andrew O. Wiget's Critical Essays on Native American Literature (1985); (2) general collections of essay that are more personal than typical scholarly essays, such as Roger Dunsmore's Earth's Mind (1997) and Greg Sarris's Keeping Slug Woman Alive (1993); (3) broad thematic studies - for example those focusing on sense of place or region, such as Robert Nelson's Place and Vision (1993) and Eric Gary Anderson's American Indian Literature and the Southwest (1999) - or those focusing on criticism, such as Elvira Pulitano's Toward a Native American Critical Theory (2003).

Bio-bibliographies offer beginning places and quick reminders. Hence these entries might best be read before and after reading the rest of the volume. They are highly selective: selective in the choice of authors and in the types of information provided. In keeping with my comments in the Introduction, almost half the entries selected were from the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries, and I selected titles that reflected the diversity of genres and the mixing of genres. The types of information selected for each entry are rather conventional: name, tribal affiliation, dates, types of writing associated with the author, place of birth (followed by place(s) where the author was raised if it or they differ from the place of birth), education, major awards, brief comments about the authors' contributions, and a short title list of major works. The designation of tribal affiliation follows the guidelines outlined at the beginning of this volume, though I have been selective on this issue also. (For example, Charles Eastman is identified as Santee Sioux; an argument could be made for adding Wahpeton Mdewakanton Dakota.) The awards list and list of titles omit many fellowships and some titles. The selectivity in titles will be most noticeable for prolific authors such as Will Rogers, Gerald Vizenor, and Diane Glancy. My main sources for these biobibliographies were autobiographical writing by the authors, the titles listed in “ Further readings,” and the essays in this volume. To the authors of all these sources I owe a debt of gratitude.