How long does it take to read The Surrounded?
The Surrounded by D'Arcy McNickle takes about 5 hours 27 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
About 5 hours 27 minutes
A weekend read
First published 1936. 297 pages, about 81,675 words.
11 days at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 9 hours 5 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 5 hours 27 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 3 hours 24 minutes |
The page count is the median across 3 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
As The Surrounded opens, Archilde León has just returned from the big city to his father's ranch on the Flathead Indian Reservation in Montana. The story that unfolds captures the intense and varied conflict that already characterized reservation life in 1936, when this remarkable novel was first published. Educated at a federal Indian boarding school, Archilde is torn not only between white and Indian cultures but also between love for his Spanish father and his Indian mother, who in her old age is rejecting white culture and religion to return to the ways of her people. Archilde's young contemporaries, meanwhile, are succumbing to the destructive influence of reservation life, growing increasingly uprooted, dissolute, and hopeless. Although Archilde plans to leave the reservation after a brief visit, his entanglements delay his departure until he faces destruction by the white man's law. In an early review of The Surrounded, Oliver La Farge praised it as "simple, clear, direct, devoid of affectations, and fast-moving." He included it in his "small list of creditable modern novels using the first Americans as theme." Several decades later, long out of print but not forgotten, The Surrounded is still considered one of the best works of fiction by or about Native Americans.
Subjects: Salish, Native, Native American, Indian, Reservation, Spanish Mission
