The Broken Cord, which won the 1989 National Book Critics Circle Award for General Nonfiction, was about dealing with his adopted son, who had fetal alcohol syndrome, and the widespread damage among children born with this problem.
"[6] The Washington Post reported: "Dorris' father's mother, who was white, became pregnant by her Indian boyfriend, but, the times being what they were, she could not marry him.
[8][9] His adopted son, a 3-year-old Lakota boy named Reynold Abel, was eventually diagnosed with fetal alcohol syndrome.
Dorris adopted two more Native American children, Jeffrey Sava in 1974 and Madeline Hannah in 1976, both of whom also likely suffered from fetal alcohol syndrome.
[10] He wrote the text to accompany the photographs of Joseph C. Farber in the book Native Americans: Five Hundred Years After (1975).
[5] After returning to the United States in 1981, he married Louise Erdrich,[4] a writer of Anishinaabe, German-American, and Métis descent.
[4] Dorris and Erdrich contributed to each other's writing[4] and together wrote romance fiction under the pseudonym Milou North to supplement their income.
[5] After the success of The Broken Cord in 1989, and an advance of $1.5 million for the outline of Crown of Columbus, Dorris quit teaching at Dartmouth to become a full-time writer.
[17] Dorris, Erdrich, and their three daughters moved to Kalispell, Montana, allegedly because of death threats Sava had made towards them.
[18] On April 10, 1997, he used a combination of suffocation, drugs, and alcohol to end his life in the Brick Tower Motor Inn in Concord, New Hampshire.
[19] In conversations with friends, Dorris maintained his innocence and his lack of faith that the legal system would exonerate him without his "demolishing" his wife and children in a "vicious" court trial.
[20] Dorris was the author, co-author, or editor of a dozen books in the genres of fiction, memoirs and essays, and non-fiction.
"[8] It tells the story of three generations of women, in a non-linear fashion, from multiple perspectives, a technique that Dorris would frequently use in his later writings as well.
[18] His memoir The Broken Cord is credited with bringing "international attention to the problem of fetal alcohol syndrome" ("FAS").
[22] When he and Erdrich co-wrote The Crown of Columbus (the only fiction they officially share credit for, although they frequently stated that they collaborated on other works), each individually wrote a preliminary draft of each section.