N(avarre) Scott Momaday Biography

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Dictionary of Literary Biography on N(avarre) Scott Momaday

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 writer; the event marked the beginning of what Kenneth Lincoln would later describe as the Native American Renaissance. Since then Momaday has told his story and the stories of his people, the Kiowa, in such works as The Way to Rainy Mountain (1969), The Gourd Dancer (1976), The Names: A Memoir (1976), The Ancient Child (1989), and In the Presence of the Sun: A Gathering of Shields (1992). By drawing attention to the high quality and cultural richness of Native American writing, his success has prepared the way for a whole 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 Allen, 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.

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