Oliver La Farge & Laughing Boy: A Collector's Authority Guide

By Josh Eldred · New Mexico Literacy Project · May 13, 2026 · ~9,500 words

Last verified May 2026 · Original research by Josh Eldred

In October 1929 Houghton Mifflin published Oliver La Farge's first novel Laughing Boy in Boston. La Farge was twenty-seven years old, a Harvard-trained anthropologist who had spent five years across 1924-1929 in Diné country and the Maya Yucatán on Peabody Museum and Tulane Middle American Research Institute fieldwork expeditions, and the novel was substantially the product of his Navajo Nation experience. In May 1930 Laughing Boy won the Pulitzer Prize for the Novel — the foundational Anglo-Native NM novel and the first major American novel with substantial Native American protagonists treated with serious literary intent. The Pulitzer designation drove substantial subsequent print runs at Houghton Mifflin, a substantial 1934 MGM Hollywood film adaptation (with Ramon Novarro and Lupe Vélez, generally regarded as a major Hollywood failure that La Farge himself substantially disowned), and La Farge's continuous Anglo-Native literary career through his 1963 death. From approximately 1940 until his death he made Santa Fe his principal residence, served as president of the Association on American Indian Affairs 1933-1942 and 1948-1963, and produced approximately twenty additional books and substantial periodical journalism. I've handled dozens of La Farge firsts in estate pickups across Santa Fe and Albuquerque — they show up with remarkable consistency in the libraries of Anglo professionals, academics, and arts-community figures who came of age in New Mexico during the mid-twentieth century. The La Farge library is a recognizable type: Laughing Boy in some edition alongside The Enemy Gods alongside the AAIA publications alongside McNickle alongside Erna Fergusson and Paul Horgan. It's the library of someone who was paying serious attention to New Mexico's Native and Hispano worlds throughout the mid-century decades, and it's a meaningful cultural artifact in its own right. This is the collector's guide to that canon.

Oliver La Farge and the 1929 Laughing Boy

Oliver Hazard Perry La Farge II (December 19, 1901 — August 2, 1963, closed pool) was born in New York City into a family of considerable cultural distinction — his father was architect Christopher Grant La Farge, and his great-uncle was artist John La Farge, whose stained-glass and mural work still occupies prominent places in American decorative arts collections. The family background in high-craft and monumental artistic production was not incidental: La Farge came to Navajo silversmithing and weaving with an eye trained to take material culture seriously, and it shows in the novel. He earned his Harvard bachelor's in 1924 and his master's in 1929, both in anthropology, with the Navajo-and-Maya fieldwork that would define his literary career conducted in the years between those two degrees under Earnest Hooton and supported by the Harvard Peabody Museum 1924-1925 and the Tulane Middle American Research Institute 1925-1928.

La Farge wrote Laughing Boy while he was still a graduate student, drawing directly from his fieldwork journals and observations. The novel was completed in 1928 and accepted by Houghton Mifflin before his master's degree was formally conferred. This is a significant biographical detail for collectors: the book is the product of a man in his mid-twenties with working anthropologist's notebooks, not a romantic outsider's imaginative projection. The narrative follows Laughing Boy, a traditional Diné silversmith from a remote part of the Navajo Nation, who meets and falls in love with Slim Girl — a young Navajo woman who was taken into the mission-school system in childhood and returned to the reservation shaped by Anglo schooling, Christian influence, and a complicated survival strategy that includes a kept relationship with a white man. The novel's central tension is between Laughing Boy's rooted traditional life and Slim Girl's irrecoverable displacement from it.

Laughing Boy (Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1929) won the 1930 Pulitzer Prize for the Novel — the category that was the antecedent to the contemporary Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, awarded for the previous year's best published American novel. It was the first Pulitzer awarded to a novel with substantial Native American protagonists treated as fully realized literary characters rather than backdrop or caricature, and the designation drove substantial subsequent print runs at Houghton Mifflin. The novel substantially shaped Anglo-American twentieth-century understanding of Navajo culture and remains widely credited as the first major American novel with that literary intent toward its Native subjects.

The 1934 MGM Laughing Boy film with Ramon Novarro and Lupe Vélez is generally regarded as a major Hollywood failure — it cast two Mexican-American actors as the Navajo protagonists, took substantial liberties with the novel's plot, and received poor reviews. La Farge substantially disowned it in subsequent interviews and essays. The film's existence does, however, confirm the novel's cultural reach in the early 1930s and contributes to the collector story: a Pulitzer-winning first edition that generated a Hollywood adaptation within five years is a different object than a simply acclaimed first edition, and the film's failure only reinforced La Farge's literary rather than popular-culture legacy.

Contemporary readings of Laughing Boy engage seriously with its formal-literary achievements while also addressing its Anglo-anthropological framing. The novel remains in continuous print and continues to appear in New Mexico and American Literature survey courses — not only because of its historical importance but because the critical conversation it invites, about who has the authority to represent whose interiority, is still alive and still productive in the classroom. La Farge himself was aware of the problem in ways that some of his contemporaries were not; his later essays on his own limitations as an Anglo writer about Navajo life are unusually candid for the period.

The 1929 Houghton Mifflin First Edition

Laughing Boy (Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston, 1929) was published in October 1929. POINTS OF ISSUE for the genuine 1929 Houghton Mifflin first edition: (1) Houghton Mifflin Company imprint on title page; (2) Copyright page reading "COPYRIGHT 1929 BY OLIVER LA FARGE" with no subsequent printing notation — first issue states FIRST PRINTING / PUBLISHED OCTOBER 1929 on the copyright page; (3) Original Houghton Mifflin decorated cloth binding (typically dark green or blue cloth with gilt spine lettering and decorative inlay); (4) Original Houghton Mifflin dust jacket with a few dollars price on front flap and the substantial Navajo-iconography cover illustration; (5) Frontispiece and chapter-decoration illustrations.

The 1929 first edition first printing was issued in a modest print run before the substantial 1930 Pulitzer announcement drove rapid subsequent printings; collectors privilege the first-printing copies, which predate the Pulitzer commercial surge. The Pulitzer announcement in May 1930 transformed the book's market position overnight — Houghton Mifflin moved into additional printings quickly, and the subsequent printings are distinguished primarily by the addition of printing notations on the copyright page and, in some cases, changes to the binding cloth. A copy representing the pre-Pulitzer first printing in original jacket is a qualitatively different object from any subsequent printing.

The condition hierarchy for the 1929 first is standard for desirable twentieth-century American fiction firsts: (1) fine in fine original dust jacket is the top tier — La Farge jackets in genuinely fine condition are uncommon, as the book was widely read and the jackets were not treated as artifacts; (2) very good in very good jacket, the more typical condition for copies that have survived in good family libraries; (3) fine binding without jacket, which is a solid collector copy but trades meaningfully below jacketed copies; (4) reading copies in any condition, which route to Tier 3. The a few dollars cover price on the jacket flap is the standard first-printing indicator — subsequent printings may show a higher price or a price-clipped flap.

The edition history after 1929: multiple Houghton Mifflin printings through the 1930s-1960s (each clearly noted on the copyright page); the 1948 Riverside Press Cambridge edition (a Houghton Mifflin imprint, handsome but not a first); the 1962 Houghton Mifflin Sentry Edition paperback (a major student-market edition that sent the novel into widespread college classroom use); the 1971 Houghton Mifflin trade paperback; and contemporary trade-paperback editions including the Mariner Books / Houghton Mifflin Harcourt edition currently in print. All post-1929 editions are Tier 3 working-library copies regardless of condition. The 1929 Houghton Mifflin first edition with original dust jacket is the principal Tier 1 La Farge collector trophy. La Farge signed at Santa Fe events and at Harvard reunion events; signed first editions trade at the upper end of Tier 1 at specialist Western Americana auction; fine unsigned firsts with original dust jacket trade at the lower end of Tier 1.

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The Broader La Farge Bibliography

Beyond Laughing Boy 1929, La Farge produced a substantial writing canon across approximately thirty-five years that spans three distinct modes: literary fiction, anthropological scholarship, and popular-press Indian-affairs advocacy. Understanding the distinctions between these modes helps collectors make sense of which items surface where and why certain titles are scarcer than others.

In fiction: Sparks Fly Upward (Houghton Mifflin, 1931) is La Farge's follow-up novel, set not in Navajo country but in a Central American republic during a revolution — a deliberate departure from the Navajo material that received respectable reviews but nothing like the reception of Laughing Boy. Long Pennant (Houghton Mifflin, 1933) is a historical novel of New England, further from his Southwest material, and is the least collected of his major novels. All the Young Men (Houghton Mifflin, 1935) is a short story collection spanning Navajo and other material — the most literary of his secondary titles and underrated as a collector target. The Enemy Gods (Houghton Mifflin, 1937) is his second major Navajo novel, addressed in its own dedicated section below, and is the La Farge fiction title most seriously engaged with federal Indian policy. The Copper Pot (Houghton Mifflin, 1942) is a New Orleans-set novel that represents a deliberate geographic and thematic break from his Southwest work — it collected moderate reviews and is Tier 3. The Mother Ditch (Houghton Mifflin, 1954) is a short New Mexico acequia novel, essentially a novella, that occupies a curious middle position: too slight for major fiction status but too geographically rooted to ignore in the NM canon context. Behind the Mountains (Houghton Mifflin, 1956) blurs the fiction/memoir line — it's autobiographical in material but novelistic in treatment, centered on the La Farge family's Santa Fe life and the Consuelo Baca family world that La Farge entered through his second marriage.

In anthropological scholarship: Tribes and Temples (Tulane Middle American Research Institute, 1926-1927, two volumes) is the foundational publication from the Yucatán fieldwork, co-authored with Frans Blom, and is the La Farge title most likely to appear in specialist anthropology library deaccessions rather than general estate pickups. The Year Bearer's People (Tulane, 1931) is the second major Maya anthropological publication. Both Tulane institutional titles are genuinely scarce in the collector market — they were produced in limited institutional print runs for an academic audience and were not distributed through the trade book system. When they surface, they typically come from university library deaccessions, retired anthropology faculty estates, or the occasional Mesoamerican studies specialist's estate. They authenticate La Farge's scholarly credentials in a way that reinforces the value of the literary firsts.

In nonfiction and popular-press Indian-affairs advocacy: As Long as the Grass Shall Grow (Longmans Green, 1940, with Helen M. Post photographs) is addressed in its own section below; Raw Material (Houghton Mifflin, 1945) is an autobiographical fragment covering his early life and the Navajo fieldwork period — more personal than the AAIA advocacy writing and more interesting as a La Farge biography source; A Pictorial History of the American Indian (Crown Publishers, 1956) is addressed in its own section below; Santa Fe: The Autobiography of a Southwestern Town (University of Oklahoma Press, 1959, with Arthur N. Morgan) is a documentary history of Santa Fe assembled from newspaper accounts and documents, with La Farge's framing essays — an important New Mexico history title that cross-collects with the Santa Fe history and Santa Fe arts communities material; Cochise of Arizona (Aladdin Books / Whittlesey House, 1953) is a children's biography of the Chiricahua Apache leader, the most accessible La Farge title in school library donation pickups. La Farge also produced substantial periodical journalism including a Saturday Review books column and significant New Yorker contributions across the 1940s-1960s — the New Yorker pieces in particular are worth noting as sources of collector interest for La Farge completists.

The Association on American Indian Affairs

The Association on American Indian Affairs (AAIA, originally founded 1922 as the American Indian Defense Association by John Collier and others, reorganized 1933 as the AAIA) is the principal twentieth-century Anglo-American advocacy organization for American Indian affairs. La Farge served as AAIA president 1933-1942 and then again 1948-1963 — the longest single tenure in Association history, spanning thirty years with a six-year gap during which he remained deeply involved. The longevity of his involvement makes him the central Anglo figure in mid-twentieth-century federal Indian policy advocacy in a way that no other writer or intellectual of the period matches.

The historical span of La Farge's AAIA work tracks the most consequential decades of federal Indian policy since the Dawes Act era. His first presidential term (1933-1942) coincided directly with the Indian New Deal under John Collier's Bureau of Indian Affairs leadership — Collier's Indian Reorganization Act of 1934 reversed the allotment policy of the Dawes era, restored some tribal land bases, and created the mechanism for tribal self-governance through constitutionally organized tribal councils. La Farge and the AAIA were broadly supportive of the Reorganization Act's intent while also pushing back on specific provisions, particularly regarding the degree of BIA control over tribal constitutions. The AAIA's Indian Affairs Bulletin, produced throughout this period, is a primary source document for mid-century Indian policy history that occasionally surfaces in estate donation pickups and is worth routing to specialist libraries when it does.

La Farge's second presidential term (1948-1963) covered perhaps the most dangerous period for Native sovereignty in the twentieth century: the post-WWII Indian Claims Commission Act 1946 (which created a mechanism for tribes to bring land claims but also, in practice, was used to extinguish certain claims through cash settlement), the rise of Termination Policy in the early 1950s (House Concurrent Resolution 108, 1953, which proposed ending the federal trust relationship with over one hundred tribes and relocating tribal members to urban centers), and the long resistance campaign that eventually reversed Termination as federal policy. La Farge testified before Congress repeatedly against Termination and organized the AAIA's national campaign to document its destructive effects on specific tribal communities. His congressional testimony from this period, preserved at the Harry Ransom Center and in the Congressional Record, is some of the most direct and effectively argued Indian-rights advocacy writing in the mid-twentieth-century record.

For collectors, the AAIA connection matters in two practical ways. First, it was a major source of La Farge's signing occasions — AAIA annual meetings, Washington advocacy events, and benefactor functions generated a steady supply of signed books from 1933 through 1963, and many of those books ended up in the libraries of AAIA board members, congressional staffers, and Indian-affairs professionals whose estates now surface in the Northeast and in Washington D.C. more than in New Mexico. Second, it situates La Farge's fiction within a decades-long policy engagement that gives the novels historical weight beyond literary interest. The principal AAIA-adjacent scholarship for collectors building the full context shelf is D'Arcy McNickle (Salish-Kootenai) — his Indian Tribes of the United States: Ethnic and Cultural Survival (Oxford, 1962 first edition) is the foundational Native-voice mid-twentieth-century Indian-affairs scholarship; McNickle and La Farge collaborated extensively during the AAIA tenure overlap, and collecting both figures together makes the political-literary history of the period coherent.

The Santa Fe Residency 1933-1963

La Farge made Santa Fe his principal residence from 1933 until his August 2, 1963 death — a thirty-year Santa Fe period that placed him at the center of the mid-twentieth-century Southwest literary and cultural community. The Santa Fe of La Farge's residency years was a complex place: the Taos-and-Santa Fe arts colony that had formed around Mabel Dodge Luhan in the 1920s (documented at DH Lawrence & Taos and Taos Society of Artists) was still a living community through the 1930s-1940s; the Spanish Colonial Arts Society was active in recovering and promoting New Mexico Hispanic craft traditions (documented at New Mexico Santero & Folk Art Books); the New Mexico Museum system under Edgar Lee Hewett's long directorship remained the institutional center of Southwest archaeology and art; and after 1945 the post-Manhattan Project scientific community added a new layer of Anglo professional presence to Santa Fe and Los Alamos.

La Farge moved into this world through two marriages that positioned him differently in it. His first wife, Wanden Matthews (married New York City 1929, moved to Santa Fe 1933, divorced 1937), was a New York heiress who brought resources and social connection to the early Santa Fe years but whose world was more East Coast than Southwest. Their two children included Peter La Farge, the songwriter discussed in his own section below. La Farge's second marriage, to Consuelo Otero Baca (married 1939, until his 1963 death), was transformative for his Santa Fe integration: Consuelo came from the Baca family, one of the old Hispano families of New Mexico with deep roots in the land-grant period. The marriage gave La Farge access to, and genuine affection for, the Spanish-colonial New Mexico world that appears in Behind the Mountains — a world quite distinct from the Navajo and Pueblo material that had dominated his writing up to that point.

The La Farge residence on the east side of Santa Fe was a literary salon site through the 1940s and 1950s. La Farge knew virtually everyone in the Santa Fe writing community — poet Witter Bynner, who had been in Santa Fe since the 1920s; Erna Fergusson, the New Mexico travel and history writer; Paul Horgan, based in Roswell but deeply connected to the Santa Fe literary world; and the younger generation of writers who came through the region during and after the war years. The connections matter for collector purposes: association copies of La Farge books inscribed to these figures carry both provenance value and biographical-literary-history interest.

La Farge's principal Santa Fe-period publications are Behind the Mountains (Houghton Mifflin, 1956 first hardcover), the autobiographical NM-residency memoir centered on family life in the Baca extended community; and Santa Fe: The Autobiography of a Southwestern Town (University of Oklahoma Press, 1959, with Arthur N. Morgan), a documentary history of Santa Fe assembled largely from newspaper sources. Behind the Mountains is La Farge at his most personally revealing; the Santa Fe autobiography is La Farge as editor and framer of historical source material. Both are Tier 2 collector targets, and both are more common in New Mexico estate pickups than in national auction rooms — they circulated primarily within the Santa Fe community and its extended network.

La Farge died at his Santa Fe home on August 2, 1963, from a coronary — the same date that closes his signature pool. He is buried at Santa Fe National Cemetery. His substantial papers — correspondence, manuscripts, AAIA documents, fieldwork journals — are held at the University of Texas Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center in Austin, where they are available to researchers by appointment.

The Ethnographer-Novelist — La Farge's Dual Identity

There is a productive tension running through everything Oliver La Farge wrote about Navajo and Pueblo life, and collectors who understand it read his books differently than those who don't. La Farge was trained as a scientist — Harvard bachelor's 1924 in anthropology under Earnest Albert Hooton, the Harvard Peabody Museum's dominant physical anthropologist of the interwar period, then Harvard master's 1929 with substantial fieldwork behind him. Hooton's laboratory valued measurement, taxonomy, and detachment. La Farge's literary voice valued interiority, beauty, and the sympathetic imagination. His career was the sustained attempt to hold both things at once, and the tension between them is what makes his fiction interesting and what makes contemporary Native scholars approach it with appropriate ambivalence.

His 1924-1929 Navajo fieldwork — conducted under Harvard Peabody Museum auspices across several extended stays in Diné country in Arizona and New Mexico — fed Laughing Boy's ethnographic density directly. The novel's silversmithing passages, its Navajo ceremony descriptions, its careful rendering of sandpainting and weaving (see the Navajo weaving collecting guide for the material-culture canon that parallels the novel's textile and craft world) carry the weight of actual fieldwork observation. La Farge had been there. He had watched silversmiths work. He knew the landscape of the Chuska Valley and the country around Shiprock. The novel's geographic and material specificity is not literary tourism — it's the residue of trained observation.

The Tulane Middle American Research Institute Maya fieldwork (1925-1928, producing Tribes and Temples, the two-volume Tulane institutional publication of 1926-1927) established La Farge's scholarly credentials beyond Navajo country. The Maya fieldwork demonstrated that he could work rigorously in a second cultural context — he was not a one-subject romantic but a functioning fieldwork anthropologist. The distinction mattered to his contemporaries and it matters to collectors: the Tribes and Temples two volumes are genuinely scarce institutional publications that surface primarily in academic library deaccessions, and they authenticate the scholarly seriousness behind the fiction.

Contemporary scholarship on La Farge — particularly from Native American literary studies since the 1990s — addresses what is now called the "Anglo gaze" problem with directness. La Farge was an outsider writing Navajo interiority, however sympathetically. Slim Girl and Laughing Boy speak and think in ways that reflect La Farge's anthropological imagination of Navajo interiority, not Navajo self-expression. The novel appears on university syllabuses precisely because it invites this critical conversation — it's taught alongside N. Scott Momaday's House Made of Dawn and Leslie Marmon Silko in courses that use the contrast between Anglo sympathetic-outsider representation and Native-authored voice to illuminate what the sympathetic-outsider tradition could and couldn't do.

The useful comparison figure is Frank Waters, whose The Man Who Killed the Deer (1942) approached Pueblo life from a different angle — Waters was a long-term Taos resident rather than a trained anthropologist, and his novel's relationship to Taos Pueblo culture is more mystical and less ethnographically grounded than La Farge's Navajo fiction. Neither writer was Native; both were serious about their material; both wrote books that remain in print and in the canon. La Farge's anthropological training gave his fiction a surface credibility that Waters's didn't have, but it also embedded assumptions about what scientific observation of culture was supposed to yield. The comparison is generative for collectors building a serious NM canon shelf — you want both.

I handle La Farge firsts alongside Momaday and Silko in the same donation boxes with some regularity — they tend to show up together in the libraries of people who were engaged with New Mexico Native American literature seriously across several decades. The presence of a La Farge first alongside a Momaday first is a reliable indicator that the donor was a serious reader rather than a casual accumulator, and it shifts my sorting calculus accordingly.

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The Enemy Gods 1937 — The Boarding School Novel

The Enemy Gods (Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston, 1937) is La Farge's second major Navajo novel and, in the judgment of most serious readers, his most important sustained engagement with federal Indian policy. Where Laughing Boy is primarily a love story set against a Navajo cultural backdrop, The Enemy Gods is explicitly a policy novel — it addresses head-on the Bureau of Indian Affairs mission-school and assimilation apparatus that was attempting to dismantle Navajo cultural continuity during the early-to-mid twentieth century.

The protagonist Myron Begay is a Navajo boy taken into the BIA mission-school system, where he receives a Christian education, adopts an Anglo name, and is progressively separated from his family, his language, and his ceremonial world. The novel follows his decades-long arc as he moves between the mission-school world that has shaped him and the traditional Navajo world that still claims him — neither fully belonging to either, working through a conflict that La Farge understood as the direct product of federal assimilation policy. The novel's title refers to the mission-school educators as the "enemy gods" of Navajo tradition, a framing that was bold for 1937 and that positioned the book explicitly in the La Farge AAIA advocacy context. For the Pueblo sovereignty and governance literature, The Enemy Gods is essential context.

POINTS OF ISSUE for the genuine 1937 Houghton Mifflin first edition: (1) Houghton Mifflin Company imprint on the title page; (2) copyright page reading "COPYRIGHT 1937 BY OLIVER LA FARGE" with first printing notation; (3) original Houghton Mifflin cloth binding with gilt spine lettering; (4) original Houghton Mifflin dust jacket. The Enemy Gods received substantially less commercial attention than Laughing Boy — it lacks the Pulitzer imprimatur, and the boarding-school subject matter was less appealing to the general fiction market of 1937 than the romantic cross-cultural narrative had been in 1929. This means first editions surface less frequently in general estate contexts, though the dust jacket is more commonly present when they do surface (the book was less heavily read-through than Laughing Boy).

In the three-tier market: a signed Enemy Gods first with jacket sits in Tier 1 alongside signed Laughing Boy firsts; an unsigned first with jacket is a strong Tier 2 collector target. The Enemy Gods is the La Farge title most sought by collectors specifically interested in federal Indian policy history and the boarding-school literature genre, and it cross-collects with the substantial scholarly literature on BIA assimilation history.

Signed Copies and Authentication

Oliver La Farge's signature pool closed on August 2, 1963 — the date of his death at his Santa Fe home. He lived to sixty-one, which means the pool is reasonably sized but not abundant. La Farge signed principally at three types of events: Santa Fe literary gatherings (the Santa Fe literary community was active through the 1940s-1960s, with frequent bookshop signings and salon events at which La Farge was a central figure), Association on American Indian Affairs functions (La Farge signed for AAIA colleagues, benefactors, and staff at annual meetings and Washington advocacy events from 1933 through 1963), and Harvard reunion events (La Farge maintained his Harvard connections throughout his life and signed at class reunions and Peabody Museum events in Cambridge).

What La Farge signatures look like: he typically signed with his full name — "Oliver La Farge" — in a moderately formal cursive, occasionally adding the year and location (a Santa Fe dated signature adds provenance value). He was not a lavish inscriber by habit; presentation copies with substantive inscriptions are uncommon and command premium collector attention. The most valuable La Farge signed copies are association copies — books inscribed to known figures in his circle: AAIA colleagues such as D'Arcy McNickle or Alexander Lesser; Santa Fe literary community members such as poet Witter Bynner (whose own collecting context is documented elsewhere in the NM literary canon); and figures from the Taos and Santa Fe arts communities with documented connections to La Farge.

Authentication resources: La Farge's substantial papers at the University of Texas Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center include correspondence with his own signature that provides the best comparison resource for authentication purposes. The Ransom Center holds the principal La Farge archive and is accessible to researchers with prior appointment. Secondary authentication resources include signed copies in the UNM Center for Southwest Research special collections, which has documented La Farge material from Santa Fe estate donations.

One practical note on forgery risk: La Farge signed on request throughout his Santa Fe years — he was not a reclusive figure — which means genuine signed copies are not so scarce that the forgery incentive is extreme. The signatures I've seen in the field that raised questions typically suffered from one of two problems: a too-modern ballpoint pen on a purported 1930s signing (La Farge would have used a fountain pen for most of his signing career), or a signature style that's shakier and more compressed than the confident La Farge hand documented in the Ransom Center correspondence. When in doubt, the Ransom Center comparison is definitive. I've seen enough genuine La Farge signatures in Santa Fe and northern New Mexico estate contexts to feel confident about the range of normal variation; when something departs from that range, the Ransom Center material resolves it quickly.

La Farge's son John Pendaries La Farge — born of the second marriage to Consuelo Baca — served as the principal La Farge literary executor through the decades after 1963, and provenance documentation through the La Farge family or through the Ransom Center substantially strengthens any signed-copy authentication argument. When evaluating La Farge signatures, the combination of signature-comparison (Ransom Center), provenance documentation (family estate chain or institutional source), and physical book-condition analysis provides the standard authentication methodology — the same methodology documented in the guide to selling Oliver La Farge books in Albuquerque and in the closed signature pools guide.

Peter La Farge — The Songwriter Son

Peter La Farge (1931-1965) was Oliver La Farge's son from his first marriage to Wanden Matthews. Born in New York, Peter grew up between the New York and New Mexico worlds of his peripatetic parents and came of age in the Greenwich Village folk scene of the late 1950s and early 1960s. He was a rodeo rider, a Korean War veteran, and a folk singer-songwriter — a figure from the same generation and milieu as Bob Dylan, with whom he had a documented friendship during the early 1960s Village scene.

Peter La Farge is best known for composing "The Ballad of Ira Hayes" — the song about Ira Hayes, the Pima (Akimel O'odham) Marine who was one of the flag-raisers at Iwo Jima and who died in poverty and alcoholism in 1955 on the Gila River Indian Community reservation in Arizona. Peter recorded the song on his 1962 Vanguard Records album As Long as the Grass Shall Grow (the title echoing his father's 1940 Indian-affairs book), and Johnny Cash subsequently recorded it on his 1964 Columbia Records album Bitter Tears: Ballads of the American Indian, which gave the song its broad popular audience and remains one of Cash's most politically pointed recordings.

Peter La Farge died in New York City in October 1965 at thirty-four years old, almost certainly by suicide. He was still largely obscure outside the folk-music world at the time of his death, though the Cash recording had introduced his work to a mass audience the previous year. For collectors of the La Farge literary and cultural world, Peter La Farge represents an important crossover point: collectors of Oliver La Farge literary firsts sometimes also collect Peter La Farge folk-music memorabilia (original Vanguard pressings, signed promotional materials, correspondence), and the biographical connection between father and son — both engaged with Native American political and cultural life, in very different modes across the 1940s-1960s — makes the double collection coherent.

As Long as the Grass Shall Grow 1940 — The Indian Affairs Photo-Documentary

As Long as the Grass Shall Grow (Longmans, Green and Co., New York, 1940) is La Farge's principal Indian-affairs popular-press treatment and one of the most important mid-century Anglo-authored documentary books on the state of Native American life under federal policy. The book combines La Farge's text — drawing directly on his AAIA advocacy work and his substantial knowledge of reservation conditions — with photographs by Helen M. Post, whose documentary photography of Navajo and Plains Indian reservation life in the 1930s-1940s is among the most significant visual documentation of that period.

The Post photographs are not illustrative in the conventional book-jacket sense — they carry independent documentary weight and make As Long as the Grass Shall Grow a genuine photo-documentary as well as a literary-advocacy text. The book is one of La Farge's most direct statements of his AAIA position: the title refers to the treaty language in which the United States government promised reservation rights "as long as the grass shall grow and the rivers run," and the book's argument is that the federal government had systematically violated those promises across the preceding century.

POINTS OF ISSUE for the genuine 1940 Longmans, Green first edition: (1) Longmans, Green and Co. imprint on the title page; (2) copyright page reading "COPYRIGHT 1940 BY OLIVER LA FARGE" with first printing notation; (3) original cloth binding; (4) original dust jacket. The photographs make this a crossover collectible for both the literary La Farge market and the documentary photography collector market — collectors of New Deal-era and Depression-era documentary photography recognize the Post photographs as significant, and copies in the photography-collector market sometimes surface separately from the literary-collector market. First editions in collectible condition with original jacket are a strong Tier 2 target; the photograph content means that even reading copies carry interest for researchers and photography collectors.

Found old books in an estate or attic? Text me a photo at 702-496-4214 and I'll tell you what I see.

A Pictorial History of the American Indian 1956 — The Crown Publishers Classic

A Pictorial History of the American Indian (Crown Publishers, New York, 1956) is La Farge's major popular-press American Indian history and the La Farge title most likely to surface in general estate pickups outside the academic and literary-specialist context. Crown published it as an illustrated trade book for the broad popular market, and it sold through multiple substantial printings across the late 1950s and 1960s — revised editions appeared in 1960 and 1974, and the 1974 updated edition, revised after La Farge's death, circulated widely through school and public library collections.

POINTS OF ISSUE for the genuine 1956 Crown first edition: (1) Crown Publishers imprint on the title page; (2) copyright page reading "COPYRIGHT 1956 BY OLIVER LA FARGE" with no subsequent printing notation; (3) original Crown cloth binding; (4) original dust jacket with the substantial illustrated cover. Collectors want the 1956 original, not the 1960 or 1974 revised editions — the 1956 first reflects La Farge's own text without posthumous editorial intervention, and the first-edition cloth and jacket are significantly scarcer than the subsequent paperbound and library-edition printings that accumulated in public libraries through the 1960s-1980s.

The Pictorial History is a Tier 2 collector target in fine first-edition condition with original jacket. Because it circulated so widely in revised editions and library bindings, the original 1956 Crown first in collector condition is less common in estate pickups than the revised editions suggest — donors often have the 1974 edition, not the 1956 original. When the 1956 first surfaces, especially with jacket and in clean condition, it warrants Tier 2 handling.

Behind the Mountains 1956 — The Santa Fe Memoir

Behind the Mountains (Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston, 1956) is La Farge's most personal book and the one that most directly documents his thirty-year Santa Fe life. Where the Navajo novels and the Indian-affairs advocacy writing address the public La Farge — the Pulitzer Prize author, the AAIA president, the anthropologist-turned-novelist — Behind the Mountains addresses the private one: the man who married into an old Hispano New Mexico family, learned the world of his wife Consuelo Baca's extended family and community, and built a domestic life in Santa Fe across two decades of American upheaval.

The book is structured as a series of linked personal essays covering the La Farge family's life in Santa Fe from the late 1930s through the mid-1950s. The Baca family world — acequias, village life, the rhythms of the upper Rio Grande valley, the Catholic feast days and community ceremonies that structured Hispano New Mexico life — is described with the same attentive specificity that La Farge brought to Navajo silversmithing in Laughing Boy, and with the additional warmth of a man writing about a world he had genuinely entered rather than observed from outside. Behind the Mountains is La Farge's most sympathetic work in the literal sense: he wrote it from inside a world that had accepted him, and it shows.

POINTS OF ISSUE for the genuine 1956 Houghton Mifflin first edition: (1) Houghton Mifflin Company imprint on the title page; (2) copyright page reading "COPYRIGHT 1956 BY OLIVER LA FARGE" with first printing notation; (3) original Houghton Mifflin cloth binding; (4) original dust jacket. La Farge signed Behind the Mountains frequently for Santa Fe community recipients — it was a gift book in the Santa Fe literary and social world, and signed copies with local provenance surface with reasonable regularity in Santa Fe and northern New Mexico estate pickups. A signed first in original jacket is a Tier 1 item. The unsigned first with jacket is a strong Tier 2 target.

Behind the Mountains occupies a distinct position in the Santa Fe literary memoir tradition alongside other Anglo writers who documented their New Mexico experience in personal essays and memoir — a tradition that runs from Mary Austin's earlier New Mexico writing through Mabel Dodge Luhan's multivolume memoirs and into the post-WWII Santa Fe professional community's self-documentation. La Farge's contribution to this tradition is distinguished by the Hispano family perspective, which most Anglo Santa Fe memoirs lack, and by the anthropologist's discipline in rendering cultural detail accurately. For collectors building the full NM literary context shelf, Behind the Mountains pairs naturally with Mabel Dodge Luhan's Edge of Taos Desert and with Witter Bynner's Santa Fe poetry of the same period.

Three-Tier Collector Market

Tier 1 trophy: The apex of the La Farge collector market is the signed Laughing Boy Houghton Mifflin 1929 first edition first-printing hardcover with original dust jacket — the principal Anglo-Navajo NM literary first-edition trophy, Pulitzer Prize 1930 winner, closed signature pool. La Farge signed at Santa Fe events and Harvard reunion events from 1929 until his 1963 death; the subset of signed first-printing copies with original jacket is small and authentic examples are genuine rarities. Fine unsigned 1929 first-printing copies with original jacket are the Tier 1 unsigned tier — they represent pre-Pulitzer print-run copies in original condition, and quality varies considerably; a collector should insist on seeing the copyright page and evaluating the jacket condition carefully. Other strong Tier 1 items: signed La Farge The Enemy Gods Houghton Mifflin 1937 first hardcover with original jacket (the more politically serious Navajo novel, signed copies scarcer than signed Laughing Boys); signed La Farge Behind the Mountains Houghton Mifflin 1956 first hardcover (the Santa Fe memoir, which La Farge signed frequently for Santa Fe community recipients); signed La Farge Santa Fe: The Autobiography of a Southwestern Town University of Oklahoma Press 1959 first hardcover; the Tribes and Temples Tulane 1926-1927 two volumes (genuinely scarce institutional publication, the scholarly foundation of the fiction). Association copies — inscribed to D'Arcy McNickle, Witter Bynner, AAIA colleagues, or documented Santa Fe literary-community figures — sit at the premium end of this tier and are the most historically interesting La Farge items in the collector market.

Tier 2 collector targets: Unsigned Tier 1 firsts in fine condition with original dust jackets; La Farge Sparks Fly Upward Houghton Mifflin 1931 first (the follow-up novel, respectable reviews, less collected than the Navajo novels); Long Pennant Houghton Mifflin 1933 first (the New England historical novel, least collected of the major La Farge fiction); All the Young Men Houghton Mifflin 1935 first (the short story collection, underrated as a collector target and genuinely good La Farge prose); Raw Material Houghton Mifflin 1945 first (the autobiographical fragment, essential for La Farge biography research); As Long as the Grass Shall Grow Longmans Green 1940 first with Helen M. Post photographs (crossover documentary-photography collectible, addressed in its own section above); The Enemy Gods Houghton Mifflin 1937 unsigned first with jacket; A Pictorial History of the American Indian Crown 1956 first hardcover; D'Arcy McNickle Indian Tribes of the United States Oxford 1962 first (the Native-voice mid-twentieth-century Indian-affairs scholarship — the McNickle firsts are undervalued relative to their historical importance); D'Arcy McNickle and Harold E. Fey Indians and Other Americans Harper 1959 first; Lloyd Currey Oliver La Farge: A Bibliography Boise State University 1972 first (the foundational La Farge bibliographical reference, essential for any serious collector).

Tier 3 working library: Subsequent Houghton Mifflin printings of Laughing Boy through the 1930s-1960s — these are reading copies, not collector copies, but they have genuine educational use and route extensively to NM schools and libraries through NMLP; 1948 Riverside Press Cambridge edition (handsome but not a first); 1962 Houghton Mifflin Sentry Edition (the edition that established the novel's college-course life, widely available); 1971 Houghton Mifflin trade paperback; contemporary Mariner Books / Houghton Mifflin Harcourt trade paperback edition (still in print, the standard reading copy); A Pictorial History of the American Indian revised editions (1960, 1974 — the 1974 is post-La Farge-death and editorially altered); La Farge children's books (Cochise of Arizona Aladdin 1953, which surfaces frequently in school library donation pickups); La Farge Saturday Review book-column compilations; literary anthologies including selected La Farge work; academic monographs on La Farge and the Anglo-Native-literature canon, including Everett A. Gillis's early study and the more recent critical scholarship from the Native American literary studies field.

NMLP Intake Position

Oliver La Farge books arrive in NMLP donation pickups with substantial frequency given La Farge's thirty-year Santa Fe residency and the substantial Santa Fe Anglo literary-and-Indian-affairs reader demographic. I see the pattern clearly at this point: the La Farge heavy reader was typically Anglo, educated, professionally established in New Mexico, and engaged with Indian affairs as a civic matter rather than an academic specialty. Their shelves often have the full run — Laughing Boy in some printing, The Enemy Gods, As Long as the Grass Shall Grow, the Pictorial History — alongside AAIA literature and D'Arcy McNickle. Donor surface concentration: UNM English Department and Anthropology Department faculty estates (substantial La Farge scholarly publication and signed first editions); Santa Fe Anglo professional retirees with substantial La Farge-and-AAIA-era library accumulation; Santa Fe arts-community estates with overlapping Mabel-Dodge-Luhan circle and Spanish Colonial Arts Society member collecting interests; Diné and Navajo-adjacent reader demographic including UNM Native American Studies faculty and student-and-alumni estates; AAIA member estates and substantial Anglo-American Indian-affairs advocacy estates.

NMLP routes Tier 1 trophy items through its book evaluation and resale services to specialist Western Americana and Native American Literature dealers (Heritage Auctions Books and Manuscripts, William Reese Company New Haven CT, Swann Galleries Native American Literature sales). I spend real time with these before routing — a signed La Farge Laughing Boy first warrants careful copyright-page examination, jacket condition grading, and signature comparison before it goes anywhere. Tier 2 trade firsts route through SellBooksABQ standard hand-sort — donor contributions fund this specialist sorting work. Tier 3 trade-paperback Laughing Boy editions route extensively to APS Title I schools, UNM Native American Studies and English Department classroom-set acquisitions, regional research-library partnership network, Bernalillo County Adult and Family Literacy Programs, and Diné and Pueblo community-library partnership donations — the novel is actively taught in New Mexico public schools, and keeping affordable copies in classroom circulation is one of the things NMLP is most useful for.

One practical note for donors: La Farge books frequently travel with related material that has its own value — AAIA publications, Indian Affairs Bulletin issues, D'Arcy McNickle titles, Southwest Indian art and craft books, Santa Fe arts community publications. I look at all of it and sort the whole context. If you're donating a library that includes La Farge firsts, don't winnow it before calling — the surrounding material often tells me as much about the collection's provenance as the La Farge titles themselves, and it all goes to good use. Free statewide pickup — schedule your pickup or text/call 702-496-4214.

Not sure whether to sell, donate, or keep? Call or text me at 702-496-4214 — I'll walk you through it.

Frequently Asked Questions

External References

• Wikipedia: Oliver La Farge
• Wikipedia: Laughing Boy
• Association on American Indian Affairs
• Harvard Peabody Museum

Related on This Site

• Closed Signature Pools — Albuquerque/NM Authors — Oliver La Farge (closed 1963)
• Navajo Weaving Books — the Diné material-culture canon that anchors Laughing Boy's silversmith protagonist
• NM Native American Literature — the contemporary Pueblo-and-Diné-voice scholarship parallel
• Willa Cather & Death Comes for the Archbishop — parallel Anglo-Catholic NM novel
• D.H. Lawrence Taos & Kiowa Ranch — parallel Anglo Taos-circle context
• Book Authentication Methodology — 1929 Houghton Mifflin first edition points-of-issue authentication

Related: Selling Oliver La Farge Books in Albuquerque