N. Scott Momaday
1 book analyzed
Biography
Navarre Scott Momaday (born 1934) is a Kiowa novelist, poet, and painter who grew up on reservations and pueblos across the American Southwest. His father was Kiowa, his mother part-Cherokee. He was raised at the Jemez Pueblo in New Mexico, where his parents taught at the day school — the same pueblo that becomes Walatowa in the novel. He earned his PhD from Stanford under the direction of Yvor Winters, who encouraged him to bring indigenous oral tradition into formal literary practice. House Made of Dawn (1968) won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1969, making Momaday the first Native American to receive the award. The novel is widely credited with launching the Native American Renaissance in literature. In 2019, he received the Ken Burns American Heritage Prize, and in 2007 he received the National Medal of Arts. He is also the author of The Way to Rainy Mountain (1969), a genre-defying work that combines Kiowa oral history, personal memoir, and historical narrative.