Sherman Alexie Save Lives

Alexie Saves Lives Sherman Alexie’s essay “Superman and Me” is about how Alexie changed his life, and the lives of others, by learning to read. “Sherman Alexie, a Spokane/Coeur d'Alene Indian, grew up on a reservation surrounded by poverty, alcoholism, and disease. . .” (About Sherman Alexie), though his family was poor, his father loved to read; and Alexie adopted that love of reading at an early age. Alexie soon started to see the world around him like paragraphs. He would read anything and everything he could get his hands on. Indians like him were not supposed to be smart. Those who failed were excepted, but Alexie refused to fail and soon became a writer, “His work carries the weight of five centuries of colonization, retelling the American …show more content…
In kindergarten, he is reading Grapes of Wrath while the other kids struggle to read Dick and Jane. In the article “Song Of Myself”, Rick Margolis interviews Alexie and asks him this, “When you were five, you read The Grapes of Wrath, which remains one of your favorites. Back then, what appealed to you about the story?” Alexie’s response to this question is, “Fleeing poverty. Getting in the car and going and trying to find a way, and being stopped at nearly every turn-the struggle against poverty” (Margolis). As a child, instead of being called a prodigy, he is called an oddity, just because he is an Indian boy living on the reservation …show more content…
Alexie states “The words still filled up the page, but I had lost the ability to tell the good from the bad. (Some might argue I never possessed that ability!) More importantly, I'd lost the courage to ignore the opinions of others. I'd lost confidence in my individual voice and vision. This was true of my poems, stories, essays, novels, and screenplays” (Alexie). For a writer of any kind to lose their confidence in themselves and in their writing is never a good thing. Change can be hard even for the most experienced writers. “So, why all the drama? My problems began with my work in the movie business. It's a sad old story. Too many novelists and playwrights have gone to Hollywood and tried to strike it rich, only to be met with crushing disappointment” (Alexie). The fear of failure, especially on a large scale like becoming a screenwriter, can always hold someone back from trying to achieve their goals. “So why am I bitter? Well, I'm bitter because screenplays are written by committee. To be sure, filmmaking is a collaborative art form (don't let any megalomaniac director or French film critic or Francophile American film critic tell you different), but the writing itself should never be collaborative. At least, that's my opinion. Or at the very least, it's how I work and cannot work with others” (Alexie). Having a writer change their way of doing things to fit