author
Ruth Hill
Best known for the sweeping historical novel Hanta Yo, this American writer spent decades researching Lakota life and culture before bringing that work to the page. Her writing reached a wide audience and later inspired the 1984 television film The Mystic Warrior.
1 Audiobook
Robert E. Lee: A Story and a Play
by Ruth Hill
About the author
Ruth Beebe Hill was an American author born on April 26, 1913, in Cleveland, Ohio, and she died on May 28, 2015, on San Juan Island in Washington. She is chiefly remembered for Hanta Yo: An American Saga, the novel that made her name and remained her best-known work.
Published in 1979, Hanta Yo grew out of many years of research and interviews connected to Lakota history and culture. The book became a bestseller, and its story later served as the basis for the 1984 television film The Mystic Warrior, for which Hill is also credited.
Hill's career has a distinctive shape: rather than building a long shelf of novels, she became known above all for one large, ambitious historical work. That gives her biography a memorable focus—a writer who devoted an extraordinary stretch of time to a single project and is still associated with it today.