Momaday, N. Scott (1934—)
N. Scott Momaday, winner of the 1969 Pulitzer Prize for fiction with his first novel, House Made of Dawn, achieved international attention as an author of Native Ameri...
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N. Scott Momaday (born 1934) is recognized as one of the premier writers in the United States. In 1969, his novel House Made of Dawn was awarded the Pulitzer prize for fiction.One of the most distingu...
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Dubbed "the man made of words," N. Scott Momaday is a Native American poet, novelist, storyteller, and artist. "It is an identity that pleases me," the author wrote in the preface to In the Presence o...
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N. Scott Momaday is the dean of American Indian authors. (Indians, especially in Oklahoma and the Southwest, use the term Indian. Academics are the ones who chiefly use Native American.) Momaday's nov...
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When N. Scott Momaday received the 1969 Pulitzer Prize for fiction for his first novel, House Made of Dawn (1968), the literary community recognized the arrival of a major contemporary Native American...
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In 1969, the same year that N. Scott Momaday began his tenure as associate professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California at Berkeley, he won the Pulitzer Prize for fi...
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Winters was an American critic, poet, short story writer, and editor who emphasized that all good literature serves a conscious moral purpose. Momaday, who studied under Winters at Stanford University...
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In the following review, Finlay offers a stylistic and thematic description of Angle of Geese, praising the volume as Momaday's best work.
N. Scott Momaday's reputation, before Angle ...
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In the excerpt below, Dickinson-Brown offers a stylistic analysis of several poems in Angle of Geese.
It is surprising that Momaday has published so few poems. Angle of Geese contains only eighteen...
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In the following essay, Mason provides an in-depth analysis of The Gourd Dancer, examining the major themes of each section and the volume as a whole.
N. Scott Momaday's first full-length co...
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In the following excerpt from an interview conducted in December 1982, Momaday discusses such subjects as Yvor Winters' influence on his works, the difference between poetry and prose, the majo...
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In the essay below, Velie provides background information on Momaday' s life and career and discusses how Yvor Winters and Frederick Goddard Tuckerman influenced his early poetry. Velie conclud...
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In the following excerpt, Schubnell discusses Momaday's poems that center on his Native American heritage, focusing in particular on part two of The Gourd Dancer.
This [essay] is devoted to ...
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Below, Anderson provides a thematic and stylistic review of In the Presence of the Sun.
There have been a number of notable collected and selected volumes of poetry over the past few years, includi...
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Winters was an American critic, poet, short story writer, and editor who emphasized that all good literature necessarily serves a conscious moral purpose. In his best-known critical work, In Defense o...
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In the piece reprinted below, McAllister provides a mixed review of The Names, questioning, in particular, Momaday's advocacy of self-imagining as a means of establishing Native identity.
Sc...
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In the essay below, Mason provides an in-depth analysis of The Gourd Dancer, examining the major themes of each section and of the volume as a whole.
N. Scott Momaday's first full-length col...
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An American critic, essayist, novelist, and editor, Larson is the author of American Indian Fiction (1978). In the following excerpt from a review of The Ancient Child, he praises Momaday's ...
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In the following mixed review, Marston faults Momaday's romanticized view of Native history in The Ancient Child.
Locke Setman, or Set, has achieved almost everything a person can in late 20...
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In the essay below, Meredith discusses Momaday's literary attempts to preserve Native American culture and examines his use of Kiowa traditions as a narrative form and "a measured angle ...
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In the following review, Bode praises Momaday's descriptions of Kiowa culture and history as well as his use of voice and language in In the Presence of the Sun.
According to their mythology...
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Here, Anderson provides a thematic and stylistic review of In the Presence of the Sun.
There have been a number of notable collected and selected volumes of poetry over the past few years, includin...
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In the following positive review, Meredith argues that In the Presence of the Sun fully achieves Momaday's purpose, which is to "express my spirit fairly."
In the Presence of t...
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In the following review, Finlay offers a stylistic and thematic description of Angle of Geese, praising the volume as Momaday's best work.
N. Scott Momaday's reputation, before Angle ...
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Abbey was an American novelist and nonfiction writer. In the following, he offers a positive review of The Names.
Momaday on Literature, Language, and Reality:
[Irving Howe once] said, "Any...
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Critical Essay by Charles A. Nicholas
As a modern, historical consciousness and a member of a largely desacralized society, [Momaday] knows that he cannot return to the mythopoesis and archaic ontolo...
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Critical Essay by Phoebe-lou Adams
Although he considers himself a Kiowa, Mr. Momaday's ancestry involves several other bloodlines, including the European. This memoir [The Names] both records...
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Critical Essay by Wallace Stegner
"The Names" is an Indian book, but not a book about wrongs done to Indians. It is a search and a celebration, a book of identities and sources. Momaday...
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Critical Essay by Paul Ramsey
In The Gourd Dancer N. Scott Momaday writes in the iambic tradition, in short-line free verse, and (of Indian lore or inventions) in paragraph-poetry. He is a good poet ...
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Critical Essay by P. Ward
[In The Gourd Dancer Momaday] achieves a memorable evocation of indigenous rhythms and emotion in a numer of poems, while turning Janus-faced in a second style to the Anglo-...
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Chanting "no justice, no peace," American Indians and their supporters marked the state's centennial Friday with a march on the state Capitol to denounce the events that led to Oklahoma's statehood...
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