So from his father’s stories, the stories of the people among whom he grew up, the sacred landscape of the Southwest, and his own observations of the conflict between the two cultures in which he moved, Momaday fashioned his novel. He has further stated that much of the life of Walatowa, Abel’s home village, was based in great part on the life of Jemez Pueblo in New Mexico. A specific example is Abel’s killing of the albino. In a 1991 interview with Loredana Nunzi, Momaday pointed out that “there is a strong strain of albinism at Jemez Pueblo and this is the pueblo that I used as the model for the book…. They are thought to have powers that most people do not have.” He elaborated further that Abel’s knifing of the albino was based on an actual episode that occurred at Jemez. Momaday recalled that at the defendant’s trial for shooting an albino at point-blank range, the defendant said that he shot his victim “because he threatened to turn himself into a snake and bite me, and so I shot him. You know, anybody would have done the same thing.” Momaday also points out that Abel and his grandfather are convinced that Cruz is a witch and highlights the ritualistic nature of the stabbing.
Containing the specific incidents and characters modeled on life at Jemez are two overarching motifs. Identifying the first of these, Baine Kerr (in Southwest Review) has characterized the novel as “a creation myth—rife with fabulous imagery, ending with Abel’s rebirth in the old ways at the old man’s death—but an ironic one, suffused with violence and telling a story of culture loss.” That culture loss links the creation myth motif with the conflict between Native American and non-Native cultures, which Momaday has said was one of his “central concerns” in the novel. Of course, both the creation/rebirth motif and the conflict of cultures are focused in the person of Abel. A third important motif is the sacredness of the land and the traditional Indian perception of the sacred bond between the people and the land. The novel reflects Momaday’s belief that “the whole world view of the Indian is predicated upon the principle of harmony in the universe. You can’t tinker much with that; it has the look of an absolute.”
But the power of House Made of Dawn and the novel’s place in the American canon are not dependent solely on Native American concerns and issues. Abel is certainly the lone, culturally divided outsider seeking his identity as a Native American in an Anglo society. He is also a typically American outcast, separated from and in conflict with not only himself but with his society—an important twentieth-century exemplar of one of American fiction’s primary archetypes. That Abel is in conflict with two cultures only intensifies his story and his quest.
The impact of House Made of Dawn on Momaday himself, on readers, and on writers who followed him was considerable. The novel’s publication and the Pulitzer Prize, Momaday has said, at first “did inhibit me in certain ways,” and he “found it very difficult to write after that for a long time.” At the same time, the novel’s reception and fame, as well as the resulting income, “alleviated a lot of the problems that come with being a young professor.” Perhaps, most important, House Made of Dawn firmly established Momaday as a writer whose work would be taken seriously. “It cleared the way for my work,” he has commented. “When I finally could get back to writing, I was free to do it.” The novel’s impact in terms of clearing the way for other Native American writers has been noted. Additionally, he was the first Native American novelist not only to focus on the plight of the contemporary Native American but also to establish that plight as representing the cultural estrangement and social alienation characteristic of postwar American fiction in general. By so doing, he served as both model and motivator to scores of younger writers.
In 1989, The Ancient Child appeared and confirmed Momaday’s status as one of our most important makers of fiction and as a guide to those elements of the past, of legend and landscape, and of the present that have the power to reconcile us to our best selves, regardless of cultural background. As Momaday has said of Abel, “He was showing signs… wasn’t he, of making his way back into the traditional world at the end of the novel.” And as he writes of Abel in the novel’s final paragraph, so he could write of himself:
He was alone and running on…. He could see…. He was running, and under his breath he began to sing…. He had only the words of a song. And he went running on the rise of the song.
Read on
Have You Read? More by N. Scott Momaday
THE WAY TO RAINY MOUNTAIN
First published in paperback by University of New Mexico Press in 1976, The Way to Rainy Mountain has sold more than 200,000 copies. This redesigned edition includes a new preface.
“The paperback edition of The Way to Rainy Mountain was first published twenty-five years ago. One should not be surprised, I suppose, that it has remained vital, and immediate, for that is the nature of story. And this is particularly true of the oral tradition, which exists in a dimension of timelessness. I was first told these stories by my father when I was a child. I do not know how long they had existed before I heard them. They seem to proceed from a place of origin as old as the earth.
“The stories in The Way to Rainy Mountain are told in three voices. The first voice is the voice of my father, the ancestral voice, and the voice of the Kiowa oral tradition. The second is the voice of historical commentary. And the third is that of personal reminiscence, my own voice. There is a turning and returning of myth, history, and memoir throughout, a narrative wheel that is as sacred as language itself” (N. Scott Momaday, from the new preface).
“Written with great dignity, the book has something about it of the timeless, of that long view down which the Kiowa look to their myth-shrouded beginnings.”
—New York Times
THE ANCIENT CHILD
In his first novel since the Pulitzer Prize-winning House Made of Dawn, N. Scott Momaday shapes the ancient Kiowa myth of a boy who turned into a bear into a timeless American classic. The Ancient Child juxtaposes Indian lore and Wild West legend into a hypnotic, often lyrical contemporary novel—the story of Locke Setman, known as Set, a Native American raised far from the reservation by his adoptive father. Set feels a strange aching in his soul and, returning to tribal lands for the funeral of his grandmother, is drawn irresistibly to the fabled bear-boy. When he meets Grey, a beautiful young medicine woman with a visionary gift, his world is turned upside down. Here is a magical saga of one man’s tormented search for his identity—a quintessential American novel, and a great one.
“A tour de force of clarity and brilliance.”
—San Francisco Chronicle
THE MAN MADE OF WORDS: ESSAYS, STORIES, PASSAGES
In The Man Made of Words, Momaday chronicles his own pilgrimage as an author, retelling, through thirty-eight essays, allegorical stories, and autobiographical reminiscences, how he became one of the first recognized Native American writers of this century. By exploring such themes as land, language, and self-identity, The Man Made of Words fashions a definition of American literature as it has never been interpreted before.
“The dean of American Indian writers… Mr. Momaday constructs beautifully cadenced sentences and summons a colorful assortment of stories and states of mind from a lively imagination.”
—New York Times Book Review
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Copyright
The author greatly acknowledges the Southern Review, the New Mexico Quarterly, and The Reporter in which excerpts of this book first appeared.
P.S.™ is a trademark of HarperCollins Publishers.
HOUSE MADE OF DAWN. Copyright © 1966, 1967, 1968, 2010 by N. Scott Momaday. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information s
torage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
First Perennial Library edition published 1989.
First Perennial Classics edition published 1999.
First Harper Perennial Modern Classics edition published 2010.
* * *
The Library of Congress has catalogued the previous edition as follows:
Momaday, N. Scott, 1934-
House made of dawn / N. Scott Momaday.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-0-06-093194-0
1. Kiowa Indians—Fiction. 2. Indians of North America—Southwestern States—Fiction. 3. Historical fiction. 4. Western stories. I. Title.
PS3563.O47H6 1999
813'.54—dc21
99-25586
* * *
ISBN 978-0-06-185997-7 (pbk.)
EPub Edition © AUGUST 2011 ISBN: 978-0-06-212153-0
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