Poets

Navarre Scott Momaday is a Native American author of Kiowa descent. His work House Made of Dawn was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1969.

Momaday is considered the founding author in what critic Kenneth Lincoln has coined the Native American Renaissance.

House Made of Dawn is considered a classic in Native American Literature.

Background

N. Scott Momaday is the son of writer Natachee Scott Momaday and painter Al Momaday.

Momaday was born on 27 February 1934 at the Kiowa-Comanche Indian Hospital in Lawton, Oklahoma, South Central United States.

He is enrolled in the Kiowa Tribe of Oklahoma and also has Cherokee ancestry from his mother.

Literary career

Momaday received his Ph.D. from Stanford University in 1963. Momadays doctoral thesis, The Complete Poems of Frederick Goddard Tuckerman was published in 1965.

His novel House Made of Dawn led to the breakthrough of Native American literature into the American mainstream after the novel was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1969.

House Made of Dawn was the first novel of the Native American Renaissance, a term coined by literary critic Kenneth Lincoln in the Native American Renaissance.

The work remains a classic of Native American Literature.