N. Scott Momaday

N. Scott Momaday (born February 27, 1934, Lawton, Oklahoma, U.S.—died January 24, 2024, Santa Fe, New Mexico) was an American author who often wrote about his Kiowa heritage. For his novel House Made of Dawn (1968), Momaday became the first Native author to win a Pulitzer Prize. His success with this work is credited with paving the way for many other Native writers in the decades that followed.

(Read Britannica’s essay “13 Great Indigenous Writers to Read and Celebrate.”)

Childhood and education

Momaday grew up on an Oklahoma farm and on Southwestern reservations, where his parents were teachers. The family’s surname originated as Mammedaty, the name of Momaday’s paternal grandfather. Its spelling was changed by Momaday’s father, Alfred Morris Momaday. Mayme Natachee Scott, Momaday’s mother, was of Cherokee and white heritage and was not entirely accepted by her husband’s Kiowa family.

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Poetry: First Lines

While living on the Pueblo reservation in New Mexico as a youth, Momaday was one of the few children in his school who spoke fluent English. He told Stanford Magazine in 2017, “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.” His mother also introduced him to poetry, and he learned Native folktales from his father’s family and other people on the reservations throughout his youth. When he was about 12 years old he decided he wanted to be a writer.

Momaday attended the University of New Mexico and earned a bachelor’s degree in political science in 1958. He then attended Stanford University, where he received a master’s degree in English in 1960 followed by a Ph.D. in 1963. At Stanford he was influenced by the poet and critic Yvor Winters. Momaday also cited novelist William Faulkner as an influence on his work. He went on to teach at several American universities, including the University of California, Santa Barbara, and the University of Arizona, Tucson.

Fiction and Pulitzer Prize

The publication of Momaday’s first novel, House Made of Dawn, came about after he was asked by an editor at Harper publishing house to submit a manuscript of poetry. Instead, Momaday submitted a manuscript for the company’s novel contest, and, although he was too late for the contest, his work was selected for publication. It narrates, from several points of view, the dilemma of a young man returning home to his Kiowa pueblo after a stint in the U.S. Army. The book won the 1969 Pulitzer Prize for fiction and became Momaday’s best-known work. In 1989 he published his second novel, The Ancient Child, which weaves traditional tales and history with a modern urban Kiowa artist’s search for his roots.

Other works

Momaday also published poetry, memoirs, essays, and collections of Native folk literature. His limited-edition collection of Kiowa folktales, The Journey of Tai-me (1967), was enlarged with passages of Kiowa history and his own interpretations of that history as The Way to Rainy Mountain (1969), illustrated by his father. Native American traditions and a deep concern over humans’ ability to live in harmony with nature permeate Momaday’s poetry, which he collected in Angle of Geese, and Other Poems (1974), The Gourd Dancer (1976), Again the Far Morning: New and Selected Poems (2011), and The Death of Sitting Bear: New and Selected Poems (2020). The Names: A Memoir (1976) tells of his early life and of his respect for his Kiowa ancestors.

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In the Presence of the Sun: Stories and Poems, 1961–1991 appeared in 1992, Circle of Wonder: A Native American Christmas Story in 1994, and The Man Made of Words: Essays, Stories, Passages in 1997. The last work offers a defense of oral traditions and addresses the injustice of government policies against Indigenous people and the necessity of preserving natural spaces. In 1999 Momaday published In the Bear’s House, a collection of paintings, poems, and short stories that examines spirituality among modern Kiowa. His other works include Earth Keepers: Reflections on the American Land (2020).

Honors and legacy

Momaday was awarded the National Medal of Arts in 2007 and received numerous other honors during his career, including a Guggenheim fellowship.

His impact on Native American writing has been cited by many other Native writers as well as by literary critics, who often mark Momaday’s reception of the Pulitzer Prize as igniting what is sometimes called the Native American renaissance. In 2019 the poet Joy Harjo declared in an episode of the PBS television program American Masters, “Momaday was the one we all looked up to. His works were transcendent.” Upon Momaday’s death in 2024 the writer Sherman Alexie told The New York Times, “I write multigenre because Momaday made it seem like it was the thing that Native American writers do. Like it was a natural part of our identity.”