IN: Sherman Joseph Alexie, Jr. (born October 7, 1966) is a Spokane-Coeur d'Alene-American novelist, short story writer, poet, and filmmaker. His writings draw on his experiences as an Indigenous American with ancestry from several tribes. He grew up on the Spokane Indian Reservation and now lives in Seattle, Washington. His best-known book is The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven (1993), a collection of short stories.

Alexie was born on October 7, 1966, at Sacred Heart Hospital in Spokane, Washington. As a little child he lived on the Spokane Indian Reservation, located west of Spokane. His father, Sherman Joseph Alexie, was a member of the Coeur d'Alene tribe, and his mother, Lillian Agnes Cox, was of Colville, Choctaw, Spokane and European American ancestry. One of his paternal great-grandfathers was of Russian descent. Alexie was born with hydrocephalus, a condition that occurs when there is an abnormally large amount of cerebral fluid in the cranial cavity. He had to have brain surgery when he was six months old, and was at high risk of death or mental disabilities if he survived. Alexie's surgery was successful; he suffered no mental damage but had other side effects. His parents were alcoholics though his mother was a sober alcoholic. His father often left the house on drinking binges for days at a time. To support her six children, Alexie's mother, Lillian, sewed quilts, worked as a clerk at the Wellpinit Trading Post and had some other jobs. Alexie has described his life at the reservation school as challenging because he was constantly teased by other kids as well as endured abuse he described as "torture" from teachers who were white nuns. They called him "The Globe" because his head was larger than usual, due to the hydrocephalus as an infant. Until the age of seven, Alexie suffered from seizures and bedwetting; he had to take strong drugs to control them. Because of his health problems, he was excluded from many of the activities that are rites of passage for young Indian males. Alexie excelled academically, reading everything available, including auto repair manuals.
QUESTION: Was he an only child?
IN: Jones was born on May 13, 1931 in a rural area of Crete, Indiana, to James Thurman Jones (1887-1951), a World War I veteran, and Lynetta Putnam (1902-1977). Jones was of Irish and Welsh descent; he later claimed partial Cherokee ancestry through his mother, but his maternal second cousin later stated this was likely untrue. Economic difficulties during the Great Depression necessitated that Jones' family move to the town of Lynn in 1934, where he grew up in a shack without plumbing.

In 1960, Indianapolis Mayor Charles Boswell appointed Jones director of the Human Rights Commission. Jones ignored Boswell's advice to keep a low profile, finding new outlets for his views on local radio and television programs. When the mayor and other commissioners asked Jones to curtail his public actions, he resisted and was wildly cheered at a meeting of the NAACP and Urban League when he yelled for his audience to be more militant, and then climaxed with, "Let my people go!" During this time, Jones also helped to racially integrate churches, restaurants, the telephone company, the police department, a theater, an amusement park, and the Methodist Hospital. After swastikas were painted on the homes of two African-American families, Jones personally walked the neighborhood comforting local black people and counseling white families not to move, in order to prevent white flight. Jones set up stings to catch restaurants refusing to serve black customers and wrote to American Nazi leaders and then leaked their responses to the media. When Jones was accidentally placed in the black ward of a hospital after a collapse in 1961, he refused to be moved; he began to make the beds and empty the bed pans of black patients. Political pressures resulting from Jones' actions caused hospital officials to desegregate the wards. Jones received considerable criticism in Indiana for his integrationist views. White-owned businesses and locals were critical of him. A swastika was placed on the Temple, a stick of dynamite was left in a Temple coal pile, and a dead cat was thrown at Jones' house after a threatening phone call. Other incidents occurred, though some suspect that Jones himself may have been involved in at least some of them.
QUESTION: Did Jones have a church at this time?
IN: Robert Dennis Crumb (; born August 30, 1943) is an American cartoonist and musician who often signs his work R. Crumb. His work displays a nostalgia for American folk culture of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and satire of contemporary American culture. Crumb is a prolific artist and contributed to many of the seminal works of the underground comix movement in the 1960s, including being a founder of the first successful underground comix publication, Zap Comix, contributing to all 16 issues. He was additionally contributing to the East Village Other and many other publications, including a variety of one-off and anthology comics.

In January 1967 Crumb came across two friends in a bar who were about to leave for San Francisco; Crumb was interested in the work of San Francisco-based psychedelic poster artists, and on a whim asked if he could join them. There, he contributed upbeat LSD-inspired countercultural work to underground newspapers. The work was popular, and Crumb was flooded with requests, including to illustrate a full issue of Philadelphia's Yarrowstalks. Independent publisher Don Donahue invited Crumb to make a comic book; Crumb drew up two issues of Zap Comix, and Donahue published the first in February 1968 under the publisher name Apex Novelties. Crumb had difficulty at first finding retailers who would stock it, and at first his wife took to selling the first run herself out of a baby carriage. Crumb met cartoonist S. Clay Wilson, an art school graduate who saw himself as a rebel against middle-class American values and whose comics were violent and grotesque. Wilson's attitude inspired Crumb to give up the idea of the cartoonist-as-entertainer and to focus on comics as open, uncensored self-expression; in particular, his work soon became sexually explicit, as in the pornographic Snatch he and Wilson produced late in 1968. The second issue of Zap appeared in June with contributions from Wilson and poster artists Victor Moscoso and Rick Griffin. In December, Donahue published the still-unreleased issue as #0 and a new third issue with Gilbert Shelton joining the roster of regulars. Zap was financially successful, and developed a market for underground comix. Crumb was a prolific cartoonist in the late 1960s and early 1970s; at his peak point of output he produced 320 pages over two years. He produced much of his best-known work then, including his Keep on Truckin' strip, and strips featuring characters such as the bohemian Fritz the Cat, spiritual guru Mr. Natural, and oversexed African-American stereotype Angelfood McSpade. During this period, he launched a series of solo titles, including Despair, Uneeda (both published by Print Mint in 1969), Big Ass Comics, R. Crumb's Comics and Stories, Motor City Comics (all published by Rip Off Press in 1969), Home Grown Funnies (Kitchen Sink Press, 1971) and Hytone Comix (Apex Novelties, 1971), in addition to founding the pornographic anthologies Jiz and Snatch (both Apex Novelties, 1969).
QUESTION:
did he win any awards for his work?