The novelist who launched a Native literary renaissance

N. Scott Momaday 1934–2024

N. Scott Momaday’s masterpiece novel was supposed to be a book of poetry. An editor at Harper asked him to submit some poems, but instead he sent the manuscript for House Made of Dawn. The book was unlike anything the editors had seen: It wove Faulkner-esque stream-of-consciousness passages into the circular structure of the Native American oral tradition to tell the story of Abel, a World War II veteran struggling to readjust to life back on a New Mexico reservation. For the novel, Momaday won the 1969 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, a first for a Native American author, but he insisted on retaining an identity as a poet. “I don’t think of myself as a novelist,” he said. “I still feel poetry is the highest form of literature.”

Born in Lawton, Okla., as a member of the Kiowa Nation, Momaday spent his earliest years on a family farm without electricity or plumbing. His Kiowa father was a painter and his part-Cherokee mother a writer, and on the Navajo, Apache, and Pueblo reservations where his parents taught, Momaday rode on horseback “while dreaming of being a writer,” said The Washington Post. He earned a Ph.D. in English from Stanford University and went on to teach at university level, writing in the early morning before classes. His well-received works were “credited with opening doors for generations of Native American authors,” and he was awarded a National Medal of Arts in 2007.

Through his many novels, poems, and essays, Momaday explored themes of identity, Native heritage, and oral traditions. While his “work was sometimes criticized for being repetitive,” he said that was intentional, said The New York Times. “I’ve written several books, but to me they are all part of the same story,” he said. “My purpose is to carry on what was begun a long time ago; there’s no end to it that I see.”