N. Scott Momaday

N. Scott Momaday, born in 1934, American novelist, memoirist, and poet, who works in broad fields of Native American history and cultural narrative. The range of Momaday's works is underscored by his ability to fuse the experiences of opposing cultures in his writings, which convey a Native American worldview founded on the principle of harmony in the universe. Born in Lawton, Oklahoma, Momaday is a member of the Kiowa tribe. He was educated at Stanford University. He subsequently taught at Stanford from 1973 to 1982 and, beginning in 1982, at the University of Arizona. He was a Guggenheim Fellow from 1966 to 1967.

Momaday's book House Made of Dawn (1968; Pulitzer Prize, 1969) tells the story of Abel, a veteran of World War II (1939-1945) who lives in the modern world but is also linked through his imagination to legend and to the sacred storytelling of his Kiowa ancestry. Momaday's memoir The Way to Rainy Mountain (1969) depicts the Kiowa tribe's journey about the beginning of the 18th century from the Yellowstone River area to the Great Plains, where they became a society of hunters. The memoir is framed by references to the Kiowa Sun Dance ritual, the last of which was attended by Momaday's grandmother in 1887.

Momaday also wrote the collections of verse Angle of Geese and Other Poems (1974) and The Gourd Dancer (1976), which echo the poetic rhythms of Native American oral tradition, and The Names (1976), an autobiographical memoir. The novel The Ancient Child (1989) concerns a Kiowa painter who exhibits his work in art galleries in Paris and New York City. The book also contains a mythical storyline in which a young tribal medicine woman metamorphoses into both a boy and a bear.