By drawing attention to the high quality and cultural richness of Native American writing, his success has prepared the way for a generation of indigenous writers whose works expand and enrich the canon of American literature. Many Native American writers, among them the Acoma poet Simon Ortiz and the Laguna poet and critic Paula Gunn Alien, have acknowledged their literary debt to Momaday, and Momaday's use of mythic subtexts in
House Made of Dawn may have influenced Leslie Marmon Silko and Louise Erdrich, who used and developed this technique in
Ceremony (1977) and
Tracks (1988), respectively. Silko's memoir,
Storyteller (1981), also bears some similarities to Momaday's
The Names. In a more general sense, Momaday's work is important because it is grounded in aboriginal oral traditions, sacred landscapes, and ancient ritual. It speaks to the reader in ancestral voices, simultaneously remote and immediate, and it is informed with the rhythms of magic formulas and the mysterious power of images originating in prehistoric petroglyphs and ancient cave paintings.
Momaday's work, however, reflects the multiple cultural contexts and traditions into which he was born or that he explored later as a student of literature and painting.
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