N. Scott Momaday

N. Scott Momaday (born in Lawton, Oklahoma, in 1934; died in 2024) was a Kiowa American writer of novels, poetry, short stories and essays. His novel House Made of Dawn (1968) is considered the first major work of the Native American Renaissance, and it earned him the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1969. Its significance lies in bringing Indigenous American literature into the mainstream of the country's letters while keeping close to oral tradition.

His family was of mixed background. His father, Alfred Morris Momaday, was a full-blooded Kiowa painter, and his mother, Mayme Natachee Scott, was a writer of children's books who also worked as a teacher. As a child Momaday moved through several reservations in Arizona and New Mexico, where he came into contact with Kiowa, Navajo, Apache and Pueblo traditions. He studied at the University of Virginia and graduated from the University of New Mexico, and in 1963 he earned a doctorate in English literature at Stanford.

His work fuses oral storytelling with the forms of the modern novel and poem. House Made of Dawn follows Abel, a young man who returns from the war to his pueblo and finds himself caught between ancestral life and the city. He then published The Way to Rainy Mountain (1969), which blends folklore with memoir, and turned toward poetry with collections such as Angle of Geese and The Gourd Dancer. His memoir The Names (1976) revisits his childhood and adolescence.

For more than three decades he taught at universities in California and Arizona, where he developed a body of scholarship on American Indian oral history. He received many honours, including the National Medal of Arts in 2007 and the Robert Frost Medal in 2021. His legacy is that of a writer who showed Indigenous literature could hold a central place in American culture.