House Made of Dawn
N. Scott Momaday (1968)
“A Pueblo veteran returns from World War II unable to speak, unable to pray, unable to run with the dawn — and discovers that the land remembers what he has forgotten.”
At a Glance
Abel, a young man from the Jemez Pueblo in New Mexico, returns from World War II shattered and silent. He cannot reintegrate into the ceremonial life of the pueblo or function in the white urban world of Los Angeles. After killing an albino man he perceives as evil, Abel is imprisoned, relocated, beaten nearly to death, and spiritually hollowed out. The novel traces his circular journey from the pueblo to prison to the city and back again, ending with Abel running at dawn in the landscape of his childhood — not healed, but running.
Read full summary →Why This Book Matters
House Made of Dawn is the founding text of the Native American Renaissance — the literary movement of the late 1960s through 1990s that brought indigenous voices into the American literary mainstream. Before Momaday, Native American literature existed largely as anthropological material or was filtered through non-Native writers. This novel proved that indigenous experience could be the subject of major literary art — not as ethnographic curiosity, but as fully realized consciousness. Its Pulitzer Prize in 1969 was the first awarded to a Native American author and remains one of the most significant canon-expanding moments in American literary history.
Diction Profile
High formality in the Tosamah sermons and Night Chant passages; austere plainness in the narrative sections; conversational directness in Ben Benally's first-person narration. The registers correspond to different relationships with language itself — oral tradition vs. silence vs. adaptation.
Deliberately low in the narrative sections