SOURCE: "Exhibition," in The Times Literary Supplement, No. 3508, May 22, 1969, p. 549.

In the following, the critic provides a mixed review of House Made of Dawn, questioning the novel's merit as a winner of the Pulitzer Prize.

House Made of Dawn is about an American Indian called Abel. It is written in self-conscious prose, which can be as regularly rhythmical as Hiawatha, and has some of the sentimental primitivism of that poem. Abel, however, has moved on, and moved down, from the great days of Crows, Comanches and the rest; no golden-world reformist statesman he, no well conducted pursuer of a modern Minnehaha. Instead he is hoicked out of his "reservation"—a sort of goldfish bowl in which his fellownationals drift dreamily round in artificial preservative—for combat duty in the Second World War. From this he returns to his people demoralized, not belonging in a full sense to any...