“May it be beautiful before me,
May it be beautiful behind me,
May it be beautiful below me,
May it be beautiful above me,
May it be beautiful all around me.
In beauty it is finished.
Yes. House made of pollen, house made of dawn.”
(The Prayer of the Night Chant, concluding lines)
Shortly before I began reading the next chronological Pulitzer Prize-winner, House Made of Dawn, I was saddened to learn of the passing of N. Scott Momaday on January 24, 2024 at the age of 89 in New Mexico. He was a towering giant of Native American letters; a poet and a story-teller of the highest order whose national recognition single-handedly unleashed a renaissance in Native American literature (as discussed in further detail by critic Kenneth Lincoln). Momaday’s success opened the door for writers like Leslie Maron Silko, James Welch, and Sherman Alexie among others. With House Made of Dawn as his debut novel, Momaday entered a fairly exclusive club of Pulitzer Prize-winners who won for their debut novel (at the time, other debut winners have included The Able McLaughlins by Margaret Wilson, Laughing Boy by Oliver LaFarge, Years of Grace by Margaret Ayer Barnes, Lamb in his Bosom by Caroline Miller, Now in November by Josephine Winslow Johnson, Honey in the Horn by Harold L. Davis, Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell, Tales of the South Pacific by James A. Michener, Advise and Consent by Allen Drury, and To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee). Momaday was the first Native American to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (he was from the Kiowa tribe), and House Made of Dawn was only the second Pulitzer Prize-winning novel to focus squarely on the experiences of Native Americans (after Oliver LaFarge’s Laughing Boy).
For me, the recent passing of N. Scott Momaday gives House Made of Dawn an even greater sense of sacredness and hallowedness, especially for a novel which is already saturated with poetic spirituality. Structurally, House Made of Dawn is a highly fragmented, kaleidoscope of a novel which was initially conceived as a series of poems, but Momaday later collected the various poems and re-worked them into a novel, albeit a panoramic collection of stories and recollections. The book is also peppered with Kiowa legend and ritual, while the protagonist, Abel, comes to embody the tragedy of indigenous cultural loss. With House Made of Dawn, I was thankful for the opportunity to learn more about an indigenous tribe. The Kiowa are a Great Plains tribe who migrated southward and made pacts with the Comanche in a vast territory in the 19th century, an area sometimes referred to as the “Comancheria” in present-day Kansas, Colorado, Oklahoma, Texas, and New Mexico. While today there is often a tendency to characterize all native tribes as one-dimensional “noble savages,” it is important to keep in mind that the history of the Kiowa shows us a complex picture of human beings above all else. The Kiowa formed peace treaties, fought wars (against the Cheyenne, Arapaho, Pawnee, Sac and Fox, Osages, and even Mexico), and like so many others, they were forced to relocate to a reservation in southwestern Oklahoma where many died of diseases following the arrival of Europeans. However, the traditions of the Kiowa are beautifully kept alive in House Made of Dawn. Today, there are approximately 12,000 living Kiowa members (N. Scott Momaday was a Kiowa himself), and as of 2012, UNESCO flagged the Kiowa language as in danger of disappearing. At the time there were only 20 living speakers left.
House Made of Dawn begins in Walatowa, Canon de San Diego, in July 1945 (Part I: “The Longhair”). Abel (whose name is a nod to the Biblical tale of “Cain and Abel”) returns home from World War II where he is reunited with his grandfather on the Walatowa Kiowa reservation in New Mexico (located east of Navajo country amidst the Indian pueblos of the Rio Grande Valley, in this case, the town is Jemez Pueblo). Abel’s grandfather, Francisco, is an elderly man with a crippled leg who farms his cornfields –his character is based on an old man Momaday knew in the Jemez Pueblo. He is dismayed to find that his grandson has become a drunken and disillusioned young man. Throughout the novel we are given a variety of distant, hazy reflections of Francisco as a younger man, memories of him running at dawn against his fellow Kiowa, like speedy Mariano, and also teaching his grandsons to run, as well. The recurring theme of sunrise running bookends the novel and it serves as a reminder of the simple, organic, earthy traditions of the Kiowa. In many ways, the novel ends right where it begins: with the practice of Kiowa running. Like the story of Abel, the cycle shows us grace and beauty but also loneliness and desperation.
The following is a scene-setting passage with a brief panorama of the Jemez Pueblo which showcases Momaday’s poetic cadence:
“The people of the town have little need. They do not hanker after progress and have never changed their essential way of life. Their invaders were a long time in conquering them; and now, after four centuries of Christianity, they still pray in Tanoan to the old deities of the earth and sky and make their living from things that are and have always been within their reach; while in the discrimination of pride they acquire from their conquerors only the luxury of example. They have assumed the names and gestures of their enemies, but have held on to their own, secret souls; and in this there is a resistance and an overcoming, a long outwaiting” (52-53).
Like the memories of Francisco, Momaday also conveys the scattered recollections of Abel –the fact that both his mother and brother (Vidal) died of diseases, and the fact that he never knew his father who was an outsider, perhaps Navajo, Sia, our Isleta. Abel remembers hunting back in January 1, 1937 when he was seventeen, dancing, drinking, and sleeping with an Indian girl. He also recalls the Eagle Watchers Society, along with its accompanying Tanoan history, and the Nietzschean imagery of a flying eagle carrying a serpent. And, struggling with post-traumatic stress disorder, Abel cannot shake the shadow of war –his dreams are surrounded by bodies in war, hanging leaves, and the passing of enemy tanks.
“He had tried in the days that followed to speak to his grandfather, but he could not say the things he wanted; he had tried to pray, to sing, to enter into the rhythm of the tongue, but he was no longer attuned to it” (53).
In town, a priest named Father Olguin connects a newly arrived woman from Los Angeles named Angela St. John with Abel since she needs help chopping firewood. They soon strike up a romantic affair, even though Father Olguin was the one who fancied Angela. Later, during the feast of Santiago, a bull runs through the streets and Abel is embarrassed by an albino “white man” named Juan Reyes who smears him with the blood of a rooster following a competition. After several days, Abel finds the “white man” at a bar and viciously stabs him to death (this incident in the novel was based on a real killing that occurred in Jemez). The passage below recounts the moment Abel stabs the “white man:”
“And then they were ready, the two of them. They went out into the darkness and the rain. They crossed the highway and walked out among the dunes. The lights of the junction shone dim in the distance and wavered like candle flames in back of the swirling mist. When they were midway between the river and the road, they stopped. They were near a telegraph pole; it leaned upon the black sky and shone like coal. All around was silence, save for the sound of the rain and the moan of the wind in the wires. Abel waited. The white man raised his arms, as if to embrace him, and came forward. But Abel had already taken hold of the knife, and he drew it. He leaned inside the white man’s arms and drove the blade up under the bones of the breast and across. The white man’s hands lay on Abel’s shoulders, and for a moment the white man stood very still. There was no expression on his face, neither rage nor pain, only the same translucent pallor and the vague distortion of sorrow and wonder at the mouth and invisible under the black glass. He seemed to not look at Abel but beyond, off into the darkness and the rain, the black infinity of sound and silence. Then he closed his hands upon Abel and drew him close. Abel heard the strange excitement of the white man’s breath, and the quick, uneven blowing at his ear, and felt the blue shivering lips upon him, felt even the scales of the lips and the hot slippery point of the tongue, writhing. He was sick with terror and revulsion, and he tried to fling himself away, but the white man held him close… He knelt over the white man for a long time in the rain, looking down” (73-74).
Parts II and III: “The Priest of the Sun” and “The Night Chanter” take place six years later in Los Angeles after Abel has served prison time for his murder. Thanks to the Indian Relocation Program, Abel has found a community of Indians in Los Angeles led by “The Right Reverend John Big Bluff Tosamah, Priest of the Sun, son of the Hummingbird.” Abel is living with a roommate named Ben Benally who comes from another reservation in New Mexico, however Abel is struggling to cope with everyday life and he faces mistreatment at his factory job, Abel falls into debt and descends into a deadly cycle of alcohol abuse. Drunk and sick, he wakes up on a beach contemplating the abyss of the sea while his body is horribly mangled and broken. Snippets of Abel’s time in Los Angeles reveal he had a passionate romance with a lonely blonde social worker named Milly, participation in a ritual peyote ceremony, and a unique blending of Christian theology with Kiowa mythology (i.e. the Gospel of John compared to the tale of Tai-me). Abel gets into a mysterious drunken fight that leaves his hands and fingers horribly broken. He and Benally make plans to see each other again and sing the “House Made of Dawn” song, knowing full well they likely never will. Part III is uniquely told from the perspective of Ben Benally and we see his observations on Abel –the “longhair”– as Abel is routinely badgered by his parole officer, welfare staff, Relocation workers, and after a seemingly endless string of bar fights, Abel stumbles into a silly drunken fight with his fellow Indians before abruptly leaving the city and returning to the reservation.
Part IV: “The Dawn Runner” takes place in 1952. Back on the reservation, Abel’s grandfather Francisco is dying on a bed in the very same room where Abel was born, and where both his mother and brother died. With his dying breaths, Francisco remembers his youth, his grandchildren, and running at dawn with the Kiowa:
“There was a moment in which he knew he could not go on. He had begun at the wrong pace… And like a fool he had taken up a bait, whole and at once, had allowed himself to be run into the ground. In the next instant his lungs should burst, for now they were burning with pain and the pain had crowded out the last and least element of his breath, and he should stumble and fall. But the moment passed. The moment passed, and the next and the next, and he was running still, and still he could see the dark shape of the man running away in the swirling mist, like a motionless shadow. And he held on to the shadow and ran beyond his pain” (182).
Abel then delivers his grandfather’s body to Father Olguin and decides to run at dawn with his fellow Kiowa: “He was running, and his body cracked open with pain, and he was running on. He was running and there was no reason to run but the running itself and the land and the dawn appearing the sun rose in the saddle and shone in shafts upon the road across the snow-covered valley and the hills, and the chill of the night fell away and it began to rain” (185).
Throughout the novel, Abel is shown to be a scarred and wounded World War II veteran, seemingly unable to find a place to call home, an outsider everywhere he goes. His post-traumatic stress disorder is manifested in a blur of alcoholism, murder, suicide, and a pervasive sense of spiritual isolation. His character represents an amalgamation of different individuals Momaday knew in the Jemez Pueblo. But by the end of the novel, Abel –divinely scorned– displays signs of returning to the traditional world of his ancestors, or at least he runs at dawn again. Abel is a tragic character, unable to share in the post-war bounty enjoyed by his fellow veterans. He experiences the quiet cultural devastation of his people, the Kiowa, while stumbling into numerous personal pitfalls. In further commentary, Momaday later reflected “Abel’s story is that of one man of one generation. It is otherwise a story of world war, of cultural conflict, and of psychic dislocation. And at last it is a story of the human condition.”
The title “House Made of Dawn” is a reference to the opening prayer from the Navajo Night Chant, which is described as “a winter healing ceremony translated into English by Washington Matthews in the late 19th century. The prayer is a profound evocation of the sacred in a culture that is ancient, noble, and deeply informed with aesthetic and spiritual principles. The prayer is one of the most beautiful that I know, and I have kept it in my heart and mind for many years.”
While House Made of Dawn is a surprisingly impenetrable novel –the non-linear plot offers a troubling portrait of 20th century alienation in a series of fragments told from different perspectives that are periodically interrupted with disparate recollections– N. Scott Momaday’s prose couldn’t be more simple, striking, rich, and inviting. Momaday’s words seem to sing with spiritual depth, and every sentence carries with it a rich bounty of metaphor. Consider the following passage from Momaday’s memoir entitled The Names (1976):
“Now as I look back on that long landscape of the Jemez Valley, it seems to me that I have seen much of the world. And I have been glad to see it, glad beyond the telling. But what I see now is this. If I should hear at evening the wagons on the river road and the voices of children playing in the cornfields, or if in the sunrise I should see the long shadows running out to the west and the cliffs flaring up in the light ascending, or if riding out on an afternoon cool with rain I should see in the middle distance in the colors and patterns of the plain, it would again be all that I could hold in my heart.”
Lastly, Momaday continues to speak to us from beyond the grave, awestruck at the enduring success of House Made of Dawn, in the following brief paragraph which was published in the 50th anniversary preface for House Made of Dawn in 2018:
“It has now been fifty years ago that House Made of Dawn was published. I wonder if it will be read in another fifty years. It is a possibility, I suppose, but certainly not an expectation. The life of a novel is generally not long, but consider that the spectrum of literature extends from Homer to the present day by the way of the Beowulf scribes, Chaucer, Shakespeare, James Joyce, Hemmingway, etc. And the span of oral tradition is inestimably greater. In the tapestry of literature there is a thread of timelessness” (xi).
Notable Quotations:
“Dypaloh. There was a house made of dawn. It was made of pollen and rain, and the land was old and everlasting. There were many colors on the hills, and the plain was bright with different-colored clays and sands. Red and blue spotted horses grazed in the plain, and here was a dark wilderness on the mountains beyond. The land was still and strong. It was beautiful all around” -opening lines.
“Silence lay like water on the land, and even the frenzy of the dogs below was feeble and a long time in finding the ear” (10).
“His mother died in October, and for a long time afterward he would not go near her grave, and he remembered that she had been beautiful in a way that he as well as others could see and her voice had been as soft as water” (11).
“He had seen a strange thing, an eagle overhead with its talons closed upon a snake. It was an awful, holy sight, full of magic and meaning” (14).
“Before the middle of the last century, there was received into the population of the town a small group of immigrants from the Tanoan city of Bahkyula, a distance of seventy or eighty miles to the east. These immigrants were a wretched people, for they had experienced a great suffering. Their land bordered upon the Southern Plains, and for many years they had been an easy mark for marauding bands of buffalo hunters and thieves. They had endured every kind of persecution until one day they could stand no more and their spirit broke. They gave themselves up to despair and were then at the mercy of the first alien wind. But it was not a human enemy that overcame them at last; it was a plague. They were struck down by so deadly a disease that when the epidemic abated, there were fewer than twenty survivors in all… Now, after the intervening years and generations, the ancient blood of this forgotten tribe still ran in the veins of men… They had acquired a tragic sense, which gave to them as a race so much dignity and bearing. They were medicine men; they were rainmakers and eagle hunters” (14-15).
“Angela thought of Abel, of the way he had looked at her –like a wooden Indian—his face cold and expressionless. A few days before she had seen the corn dance at Cochiti. It was beautiful and strange. It had seemed to her that the dancers meant to dance forever in that slow, deliberate way. There was something so grave and mysterious in it, those old men chanting in the sun, and the dancers… so terribly serious in what they were doing. No one of them ever smiled” (32).
“The canyon is a ladder to the plain. The valley is pale in the end of July, when the corn and melons come of age and slowly the fields are made ready for the yield, and a faint, false air of autumn –an illusion still in the land—rises somewhere away in the high north country, a vague suspicion of red and yellow on the farthest summits. And the town lies like a scattering of bones in the heart of the land, low in the valley, where the earth is a kiln and the soil is carried here and there in the wind and all harvests are a poor survival of the seed. It is a remote place, and divided from the rest of the world by a great forked range of mountains on the north and west; but wasteland on the south and east, a region of dunes and thorns and burning columns of air; and more than these by time and silence… There is a kind of life that is peculiar to the land in summer –a wariness, a seasonal equation of well-being and alertness” (50).
“There are low, broken walls on the tabletops and smoke-blackened caves in the cliffs, where still there are metates and broken bowls and ancient ears of corn, as if the prehistoric civilization had gone out among the hills for a little while and would return; and then everything would be restored to an older age, and time would have returned upon itself and a bad dream of invasion and change would have been dissolved in an hour before the dawn. For man, too, has tenure in the land; he dwelt upon the land twenty-five thousand years ago, and his gods before him” (52).
“It wasn’t going turn out right, because it was too late; everything had gone too far with him, you know, and he was already sick inside. Maybe h was sick a long time, always, and nobody knew it, and it was just coming out for the first time and you could see it” (146).
“Look out for me, I said: look out each day and listen for me. And we were going together on horses to the hills. We were going to ride out in the first light to the hills. We were going to ride out in the first light to the hills. We were going to see how it was, and always was, how the sun came up with a little wind and the light ran out upon the land. We were going to get drunk, I said. We were going to be all alone, and we were going to get drunk and sing. We were going to sing about the way it always was. And it was going to be right and beautiful. It was going to be the last time. And he was going home” (166).
“These things he told to his grandsons carefully, slowly and at length, because they were old and true, and they could be lost forever as easily as one generation is lost to the next, as easily as one old man might lose his voice, having spoken not enough or not at all” (173).
On The 1969 Pulitzer Prize Decision
According to former Pulitzer Prize administrator John Hohenberg, the jury in 1969 consisted of an entirely new trio (detailed further below). Strangely, the Pulitzer Prize website does not publicly list the names of the fiction jury in 1969. At any rate, the jury made a “real surprise” when selecting N. Scott Momaday’s House Made of Dawn. Apparently, Momaday –then a poet and teacher at UC Santa Barbara—was so little known that even his own publisher Harper & Row didn’t immediately recall the name of his novel when the Pulitzer Prize was announced. Momaday, himself, was in shock and, at first, he refused to believe the news. At the time, The New York Times reported: “If the 35-year-old author was surprised, the publishing community seemed stunned at the selection of the relatively unknown author for one of the most coveted literary prizes in the country.”
The 1969 Fiction jury consisted of the following members:
- Chair: P. (Pierre) Albert “Al” Duhamel (1920-2006) was a professor of English at several prominent universities, including the University of Chicago (1945-1949) and most notably at Boston University (1949-1990). He received his BA from Holy Cross College and his PhD from the University of Wisconsin. Duhamel was involved with a variety of literary organizations like the National Endowment for the Humanities. In addition to serving on the Pulitzer Prize Fiction Jury, he also served on the National Book Award Jury (1972-1973). He was the book editor at the Boston Herald where he wrote a weekly column entitled “I’ve Been Reading” and he later hosted a literary television show, reportedly sporting a Harris tweed and often flanked by fellow academics, entitled “People Are Reading.” Interestingly enough, an odd and amusing episode of the show “People Are Reading” gave Julia Child her initial television debut, but it was typically a dry academic program that has been described as a predecessor to more contemporary shows like Charlie Rose. When Dumahel died in 2006 he was survived by his daughter.
- Edmund Fuller (1914-2001) was a reviewer at The Saturday Review (previously “The Saturday Review of Literature”) and other New York newspapers (The New York Herald Tribune and The New York Times) and he was book review editor of The Wall Street Journal for 32 years. He was an adherent of traditional Christian humanism, as such he was a critic of “the post-Chatterley deluge” among writers like Nelson Algren, James Jones, Norman Mailer, and Jack Kerouac. He preferred writers who portrayed mankind as essentially rational, free, responsible, purposeful, albeit fallible, as found in writers like Thornton Wilder, Gladys Schmitt, Alan Paton, C. P. Snow, C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, and Charles Williams. Throughout his career, he wrote several novels, a biography of Milton, other books on Gertrude Stein and George Bernard Shaw, taught playwrighting at The New School for Social Research, served as editor-in-chief at Crown Publishers where he edited several compilations, and taught English and theology at the Kent School in Connecticut. He served on two juries for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (1969 and 1973). Fuller lived on a 262-acre farm in Vermont with his family before relocating to Chapel Hill, NC in retirement. When he died at the age of 86 in 2001, he was survived by two sons and two daughters.
- Raymond Walters Jr. (1912-2003) was an editor of the New York Times Book Review where he penned a weekly column in the 1970s and 1980s entitled “Paperback Talk.” The column chronicled the paperback revolution in the publishing industry. He worked at The New York Times Book Review from 1958-1982. A compilation of the columns was published in 1985. He was a graduate of Swarthmore College, completed postgraduate work at Princeton and Columbia, and received a doctorate in American History from Columbia University. He wrote biographies of two early treasury secretaries, Alexander James Dallas (under President James Madison) and Albert Gallatin (under President Thomas Jefferson and James Madison). Walters also worked at Current History Magazine, The Saturday Review, and Encore. His father had been president emeritus of the University of Cincinnati. Walters was a long-time resident of Manhattan.
The jury report in 1969, which was accepted by the Board, read as follows: “Our first choice is N. Scott Momaday’s House Made of Dawn because of its, in one of the members of the jury, ‘eloquence and intensity of feeling, its freshness of vision and subject, its immediacy of theme,’ and because an award to its author might be considered as a recognition of ‘the arrival on the American literary scene of a matured, sophisticated literary artist from the original Americans.’” In the jury report on December 20, 1968, P. Albert Dumahel quotes the other two members of the jury frequently.
The second choice the jury offered was A World of Profit by Louis Auchincloss, “though not, perhaps, the author’s best work, is not uncharacteristic of the work of one of our best novelist of manners.” The third choice was And Other Stories by John O’Hara “which, though the author has never won a Pulitzer, contains at least two stories which reflect the level of achievement that has characterized the author’s work… one of the members of the jury considered the story, ‘A Few Trips and Some Poetry’ included in the current collection particularly impressive.” As an interesting point of note, the jury report was sent to John Hohenberg’s office at Columbia University and his secretary at the time was Rose Valenstein.
According to John Hohenberg, the Board was not exactly ecstatic at the selection of House Made of Dawn and it received a somewhat mixed reaction, but the jury has since been mostly vindicated as N. Scott Momaday has been hailed as a literary trailblazer.
Momaday later reflected that winning the Pulitzer “did inhibit me in certain ways” and that he “found it very difficult to write after that for a long time.” His next novel was published over twenty years later: The Ancient Child (1989).
Of course, one of the big headline-grabbing announcements in 1969 was Norman Mailer winning a co-prize in the “General Nonfiction” category for The Armies of Night. Fresh off the heels of a four-day protest against the Vietnam War, Mailer decided to seek the Democratic nomination for Mayor of New York City (his bid ultimately failed). After winning a Pulitzer, he announced his plan to contribute the $1,000 award toward his political campaign and he received considerable press for this stunt. Also that same year, Moneta Sleet Jr. of Ebony Magazine won a Pulitzer Prize in “Feature Photography” for his photograph of Martin Luther King Jr.’s widow and child taken at Dr. King’s funeral.
Who is N. Scott Momaday?
Navarre Scott Momaday (1934-2024) was born in Lawton, Oklahoma in an Indian Hospital. During the Great Depression when Momaday was an infant his family moved from Oklahoma to New Mexico. Within days of their son’s birth, his parents took him to live on his paternal grandmother’s depression-stricken farm on the Kiowa reservation. He was honored with the Indian name of Tsoaitalee (“Rock Tree Boy”), a name for the sacred Devil’s Tower in Wyoming. Soon, his parents found work on the Navajo Reservation. At age twelve he moved to the Jemez Pueblo where he was granted a horse named Pecos and remarkable degree of freedom, learning about the Navajo, Apache, and Pueblo traditions –“It was for me a house made of dawn, pollen, rain, and wonder.” Momaday later described it as a “Pan-Indian experience.” His mother Mayme “Natachee” Scott Momaday was a writer and of Cherokee descent, and father Alfred Morris Momaday was a visual artist and Native American whose first language was Kiowa (pronounced “kai-uh-wuh”). They bought an adobe in Jemez Springs built in 1870, the Benevides house in the novel (where Abel visits Angela St. John to chop wood) and this was where Momaday began to write his novel. During his childhood, Momaday claimed to be a self-professed expert on Billy the Kidd. He started writing at the age of twelve, having fallen in love with poetry which was read to him by his mother.
After high school at Augustus Military Academy in Fort Defiance, Virginia, Momaday studied political science at the University of New Mexico before attending the University of Virginia Law School where he encountered William Faulkner who then a writer-in-residence at the university. From this point onward, Momaday decided against studying the law and focused on teaching like his parents. Momaday spent a year teaching impoverished kids at the Dulce Independent School on the Jicarilla reservation in northern New Mexico.
Shortly thereafter, Momaday received a Stegner Creative Writing Fellowship to attend the Stanford University Creative Writing Center in the spring of 1959. It was established by 1972 Fiction winner Wallace Stegner in the aftermath of World War II and brought forth a diverse panoply of literary voices, like Ken Kesey and Raymond Carver. Momaday was admitted as a poetry fellow –he always regarded poetry as the highest of the arts. He immersed himself in the works of Dylan Thomas, Hart Crane, Wallace Stevens, and Emily Dickinson. Momaday was mentored by Yvor Winters, a modernist poet-critic known for his contrarian interpretations of American Romanticism, instead championing the heretical likes of Herman Melville, Emily Dickinson and Frederick Goddard Tuckerman (whom Momaday wrote his doctorate on). Momaday completed an MA and PhD at Stanford before accepting a tenure-track position at UC Santa Barbara. He was given a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1966 relocated to Amherst before returning to Santa Barbara, all the while continuing to work on his magnum opus House Made of Dawn.
His writing routine was as follows: he awoke every day at 5am, drove to a nearby restaurant for breakfast and coffee, read The Los Angeles Times. By 7am he was back at his typewriter and wrote until noon. During this period, Momaday taught at various institutions –the University of California, Berkeley, Stanford and the University of Arizona– while pursuing his multifaceted interests in various disciplines, and during a détente in the Cold War, he was one of the few Western academics to teach in behind the Iron Curtain, spending the 1973-1974 academic year at Moscow State University as a Fulbright lecturer.
In 1983, critic Kenneth Lincoln asserted that the publication of House Made of Dawn instantiated a Native American Renaissance in American literature, inspiring the likes of 2021 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction winner Louise Erdrich, former U.S. Poet Laureate Joy Harjo (2019-2022), and influential anthologist Duane Niatum. Upon Momaday’s death in 2024, Joy Harjo offered the following reflections as tribute: “Momaday found a way to move eloquently between oral storytelling forms and the written English novel form. The trajectory of the book moves from sunrise to sunrise, making a circle — a story structure recognizable in indigenous oral traditions, yet following traditional American literary shape and expectations of a novel. The title is drawn directly from the traditional literature of the Diné people.”
In 2007, Momaday received the National Medal of Arts for his work’s celebration and preservation of Indigenous oral and art tradition. He delivered a number of public lectures and was interviewed frequently on PBS programs, many of which are freely available online to this day. In an interview with Stanford Magazine in 2017, he said the following: “I have spent most of my life in two worlds, the Native traditional and the modern. I had a great deal of help in spanning that divide. My parents, of course, were teachers, and my mother had a real command of the English language, and she passed on that knowledge and love to me… In school, that made a real difference. In some ways, I had an advantage that most of my peers did not… I was writing out of my knowledge of oral tradition.”
Momaday’s marriages to Gaye Mangold and Regina B. Heitzer-Momaday both ended in divorce. His third marriage, to Barbara Gregg Glenn Momaday, only ended when she died in 2008. Momaday died on January 24, 2024 at the age of 89 at his home in Santa Fe, New Mexico. He was survived by two daughters from his first marriage, Jill Momaday and Brit Momaday-Leight (another daughter from his first marriage, Cael Momaday, passed away in 2017). He was also survived by a daughter from his second marriage, Lore Denny.
Film Adaptation:
- House Made of Dawn (1972)
- Director: Richardson Morse
- Starring Larry Littlebird
This was an independent film. The script was co-written by Momaday and Morse. It has since been preserved by the National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI).
Literary Context in 1968-1969
- Nobel Prize for Literature (1968): Japanese writer Yasunari Kawabata, the first Japanese recipient of the prize “for his narrative mastery, which with great sensibility expresses the essence of the Japanese mind.”
- National Book Award Winner (1969): Steps by Jerzy Kosinski.
- Booker Prizer Winner (1969): Something to Answer For by P. H. Newby –the inaugural Booker Prize winner.
- Per Publishers Weekly, the #1 bestseller in 1968 was Airport by Arthur Hailey. Other books on the bestseller list that year included Couples by John Updike, A Small Town in Germany by John le Carre, Preserve and Protect by Allen Drury (who also won the Pulitzer Prize earlier in the decade for his novel Advise and Consent), and Myra Breckinridge by Gore Vidal.
- The first post-Fleming James Bond continuation novel was released, Colonel Sun by “Robert Markham” (a.k.a. Kingsley Amis).
- The first translations and book-length discussion of the ancient Sumerian Enheduanna’s work was published. She was a priestess and poet of the 23rd century BC and one of the oldest known writers.
- In Watermelon Sugar by Richard Brautigan was published.
- 2001: A Space Odyssey by Arthur C. Clarke was published.
- Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? By Philip K. Dick was published.
Did The Right Book Win?
In spite of House Made of Dawn being a stridently abstruse novel, I still found it to be an altogether powerful work. N. Scott Momaday’s poetic prose has a quality of solemnity and sacredness, while also offering an earthy and unpretentious story which enchants and lures the reader from the start. In 1969, the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction quite evidently took a big risk when selecting a largely unknown work like House Made of Dawn, but it succeeded to an extraordinary degree and today many critics credit the Pulitzer Prize’s elevation of N. Scott Momaday as the impetus for a veritable Native American literary renaissance.
Momaday, N. Scott. House Made of Dawn. Harper Perennial, Modern Classics. New York, NY, 2018 (originally published in 1968).
Momaday’s dedication reads “For Gaye,” his first wife, and the author also acknowledges the Southern Review, the New Mexico Quarterly, and The Reporter in which excerpts of this book first appeared.