Critical reception of the novel was enthusiastic. Riding the Earthboy 40: Poems was followed by the publication of Welch's first novel, Winter in the Blood, which he wrote between 19 and which was published in 1974. This led to the publication of his first collection of poems, Riding the Earthboy 40: Poems (1971). The following year, Welch was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts grant. In 1968, he married Lois Monk, a university teacher. He began writing poetry and entered the master of fine arts program, but he did not complete the degree. He graduated from the University of Montana in 1965 with a bachelor's degree in liberal arts. He graduated from high school in 1958 and briefly attended the University of Minnesota before returning to Montana. Welch was raised as a Catholic and attended schools on the Blackfeet and Fort Belknap reservations before moving with his family to Minneapolis. His mother, who trained as a stenographer, was a member of the Gros Ventre tribe. His father, a welder, hospital administrator, and later rancher and farmer, was a Blackfeet Indian.

James Welch was born on November 18, 1940, on the Blackfeet reservation in Browning, Montana. This refers to works published from the late-1960s onwards, when Native American writers began to become more prominent in the American literary landscape. With its sharp poetic imagery and its realistic portrayal of life on a Montana reservation, Winter in the Blood is considered one of the most important works of the movement known as the Native American Renaissance. However, the narrator also has significant encounters with an old Indian named Yellow Calf, through which he learns more of his family heritage. The narrator seems to have no purpose or direction in life, and when he visits the small towns that border the reservation in search of his girlfriend, he gets drunk in bars and indulges in meaningless sex with women he picks up there. He lives on a cattle ranch with his mother and stepfather, but he is an alienated individual who feels little affection for his family. The protagonist and narrator of the novel is a thirty-two-year-old Blackfeet Indian whose name is never revealed. It is the fourth largest Indian reservation in Montana more than five thousand people live there.

Winter in the Blood (1974), the first novel by James Welch, is set on the Fort Belknap Indian Reservation in Montana, which is located forty miles south of the Canadian border and twenty miles north of the Missouri River.

Winter in the blood book