SOURCE: "The Search for Identity: N. Scott Momaday's Autobiographical Works," in his Four American Indian Literary Masters: N. Scott Momaday, James Welch, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Gerald Vizenor, University of Oklahoma Press, 1982, pp. 34-49.

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 concludes that although Momaday is a good poet overall, he is at his best in his prose poems.

After he had exhausted reservation schools, Momaday spent his last year of high school at a military school in Virginia and then enrolled in the University of New Mexico. It was there that he began writing poetry, and in 1959 published his first poem, "Earth and I Give You Turquoise," in the New Mexico Quarterly. After college Momaday tried a year of law school in the University of Virginia...