A short life of the author
Navarre Scott Momaday (1934–2024) was born on 27 February 1934 in Lawton, Oklahoma, and grew up on Navajo, Apache, and Pueblo reservations in the American Southwest, where his parents were teachers. He is of Kiowa descent. He studied at the University of New Mexico and Stanford University, where he studied with the poet and critic Yvor Winters.
Life and Career
House Made of Dawn (1968) won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction — the first novel by a Native American writer to receive the award — and is regarded as the beginning of the Native American Renaissance. The novel follows Abel, a young man who returns from World War II to his Jemez Pueblo community unable to reintegrate into either traditional or modern American life. The novel’s lyrical density, its use of landscape as a spiritual force, and its non-linear structure make it one of the most formally ambitious American novels of the 1960s.
The Way to Rainy Mountain (1969) — a short, genre-defying work that braids Kiowa myth, historical chronicle, and personal memoir in three parallel columns — is his other masterwork. It traces the migration of the Kiowa people from their emergence in the Yellowstone region to the southern Plains, and it does so in a form that embodies the Kiowa understanding of story as inseparable from place.
Major Works and Themes
Momaday writes about the relationship between language, land, and identity. His central conviction is that the oral tradition — the telling of stories — is what connects a people to their land and to their history. His prose is lyrical, precise, and deeply influenced by the landscape of the American Southwest.
Key Works
- House Made of Dawn (1968) — Pulitzer Prize
- The Way to Rainy Mountain (1969)
- The Ancient Child (1989)
Collecting Momaday
House Made of Dawn (1968, Harper & Row) — the Pulitzer-winning debut — brings $200–$800. The small initial print run makes true firsts scarce. The Way to Rainy Mountain (1969, University of New Mexico Press) brings $50–$200. Momaday signed at university events and readings. He died in 2024; all signed copies are finite.