House Made of Dawn - N. Scott Momaday - 1968
Introduction
A powerful look at the alienation one Native American experiences, House Made of Dawn (1968) is regarded as the beginning of the Native American renaissance in literature. The first novel by highly regarded Native American author N. Scott Momaday, House Made of Dawn surprised everyone when it won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1969. This marked the first time an American Indian was given this award. Momaday did not believe it initially when he was called with the news, and even the publisher had forgotten it had published the novel.
Momaday began writing what became House Made of Dawn several years earlier as a series of poems. It gradually evolved into stories, before being published as a novel in 1968. Momaday had previously published excerpts in the Southern Review, New Mexico Quarterly, and The Reporter.
Like Abel in the novel, Momaday grew up on Indian reservations, where his parents—his father was a Kiowa Indian while his mother was part Cherokee—worked as educators. He learned much about several Native American cultures throughout this childhood, and he appreciated the land, language, and oral traditions of American Indians. Momaday drew on this familiarity while writing the book, the title of which comes from a Navajo religious ceremony song, "House Made of Dawn."
In House Made of Dawn, Momaday explores complex ideas about American Indian identity, language, landscape, and cultural conflict in a lyrical, stream-of-consciousness style.
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