Some reviewers believed they saw in The Antelope Wife the anguish Erdrich must have felt as her marriage crumbled, but she has stated that she is unconscious of having mirrored any real-life events. The Antelope Wife was published in 1998, not long after her separation from Michael and his subsequent suicide. She and Michael became a picture-book husband-and-wife writing team, though they wrote only one truly collaborative novel, The Crown of Columbus (1991). After she was named writer-in-residence at Dartmouth, she married professor Michael Dorris and raised several children, some of them adopted. She attended the Johns Hopkins creative writing program and received fellowships at the McDowell Colony and the Yaddo Colony.

She worked at various jobs, such as hoeing sugar beets, farm work, waitressing, short order cooking, lifeguarding, and construction work, before becoming a writer. Her fiction reflects aspects of her mixed heritage: German through her father, and French and Ojibwa through her mother. Born in 1954 in Little Falls, Minnesota, she grew up mostly in Wahpeton, North Dakota, where her parents taught at Bureau of Indian Affairs schools. Louise Erdrich is one of the most gifted, prolific, and challenging of contemporary Native American novelists. She is widely acclaimed as one of the most significant Native writers of the second wave of what critic Kenneth Lincoln has called the Native American Renaissance. She is an enrolled member of the Anishinaabe nation (also known as Chippewa).

Her father is German American and mother is half Ojibwe and half French American. Karen Louise Erdrich is a American author of novels, poetry, and children's books.

The beet queen