N. Scott Momaday was a Kiowa author, essayist, and poet whose novel, “House Made of Dawn,” won the 1969 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and helped spark the Native American Renaissance movement in literature.
- Died: January 24, 2024 (Who else died on January 24?)
- Details of death: Died in Santa Fe, New Mexico at the age of 89.
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N. Scott Momaday’s legacy
Momaday’s love of the arts was cultivated at an early age by his mother, a writer, and his father, a painter. When he was a child, his family moved from Oklahoma to a reservation in Arizona. While his parents became teachers, Momaday grew up immersing himself in Kiowa culture and learning about Navajo, Apache, Pueblo, and other Southwest Indigenous American traditions. He completed his undergraduate studies at the University of New Mexico, then earned his doctorate in English literature from Stanford University.
His first book, “The Complete Poems of Frederick Goddard Tuckerman,” was based on his dissertation and published in 1965. But it was his second book, “House Made of Dawn,” that established Momaday as a household name in the world of literature. The novel won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1969 and is credited by critic Kenneth Lincoln as sparking the Native American Renaissance, a modern surge of significant literary works by Native American authors.
In addition to writing, Momaday enjoyed an academic career that began in the early 1960s and spanned over 35 years. He specialized in Native American oral history and exploring the sacred in culture. He was a tenured professor at several universities including Stanford, and he also taught at Columbia and Princeton.
All told, Momaday wrote nearly 20 collections of fiction, poetry, and essays. He received numerous literary and artistic honors, including being named the Oklahoma Centennial Poet Laureate and receiving the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement, the National Medal of Arts by President George W. Bush, and a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Native Writers’ Circle of the Americas.
Notable quote
“The oral tradition is very powerful, in some ways much more vital than writing.”—from the 2019 “American Masters” episode “N. Scott Momaday: Words From a Bear”
Tributes to N. Scott Momaday
Full obituary: The New York Times
