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N. Scott Momaday refutes the American Dream because he doesn’t wanna lose his culture, money and lifestyle. Redefines the American Dream as the ability to move forward into the future. He wants to tell people about his books and how they don’t believe in the dream.

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He writes a lot of books and  writes them for a meaning a purposes but he doesn’t support the American Dream. He wants to tell people about his books and how they don’t believe in the dream. Momaday enrolled at the University of New Mexico in 1952. He earned a bachelor's degree in political science in 1958. Taking a one-year break from his studies, he taught school on the Jicarilla Apache reservation before pursuing graduate studies in literature. During his years as an undergraduate student, Momaday distinguished himself as a writer and a public speaker, receiving the John Hay Whitney Fellowship in creative poetry writing and the Stanford Wilson Dissertation Fellowship at Stanford University.

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Born: February 27, 1934 in Lawton, Oklahoma, United States

Other Names: Mammedatty, Novarro Scotte; Momaday, Navarre Scott; Tsoai-talee; Rock Tree Boy

"Some of my mother's memories have become my own. This is the real burden of the blood; this is immortality."

One of the most distinguished Native American authors writing today, N. Scott Momaday is known for novels and poetry collections that relate the oral legends (traditional tales and fables that have been passed on, generation to generation, through the spoken word) of his Kiowa heritage. His 1969 novel, House Made of Dawn, was the first novel by a Native American to win the Pulitzer Prize in fiction. The book played a key role in developing a widespread readership of Native American literature in the United States. Published in the late 1960s, when groups of non-native American youth were discovering and embracing many aspects of Native American traditions, House Made of Dawn influenced-and also brought attention to-other gifted Indian writers, including Vine Deloria Jr., Leslie Marmon Silko, and James Welch.

Momaday has written several books and a play since House Made of Dawn. He also has taught at several universities, including the University of California at Santa Barbara, New Mexico State University, and Stanford University. As of 2011, Momaday was listed as faculty member at the University of Arizona, where he is a Regents Professor of English. In 2007, President George W. Bush awarded Momaday the National Medal of Arts for "for his writings and his work that celebrate and preserve Native American art and oral tradition."

Born in a Kiowa Indian hospital in Lawton, Oklahoma, on February 27, 1934, Navarre Scott Momaday was the only child of Kiowa artist Alfred Morris Momaday and teacher Mayme Natachee Scott Momaday. A descendant of early American pioneers, Momaday's mother derived her middle name from a Cherokee great-grandmother, Natachee. Momaday's father inherited the Kiowa family name "Mammedaty" from Momaday's grandfather. Momaday explains how his grandfather's name became a family name, in European rather than Kiowa tradition. "At that time," Momaday explains "people had but one name. [Mammedaty] was the name that was given to him as a child, and that was the only name he had. But during his lifetime the missionaries came in, and the Indians adopted the Christian tradition of the surname and the Christian name. And so my grandfather was given the name John, and he became known as John Mammedaty, and Mammedaty simply became the surname of his family. It was passed down. Some of my relatives in Oklahoma still use that spelling, but my father abbreviated it to Momaday."

Much of Momaday's writing is a collection of memories, but not all of his memories stem from his own personal experience. Momaday attributes many of his memories to his parents. "Some of my mother's memories have become my own. This is the real burden of the blood; this is immortality," he relates in The Names: A Memoir. Born of mixed blood, his mother began to identify with her Indian heritage around the age of sixteen. A beautiful girl, she called herself "Little Moon" while her cousins referred to her as "Queen of Sheba." Both names pleased her. To pursue a degree and to learn more about her Indian heritage, Natachee attended the Haskell Institute, the Indian school at Lawrence, Kansas, in 1929. To her son, she passed on her intense love of books-especially English literature.

Cultivates vivid early memories

Momaday remembers that the first notable event in his life occurred when he was just six months old and he accompanied his parents on a journey to the Black Hills in Wyoming to see Devil's Tower. Referred to in Kiowa as Tsoai ("Rock Tree"), Devil's Tower became the source of Momaday's Kiowa name, Tsoai-talee. The name was given to him by Pohd-lohk ("Old Wolf"), a Kiowa elder. Pohd-lohk had in his possession a ledger from the Supply Office at Fort Sill that depicted the history of the Kiowa people from 1833. Momaday would later derive a great deal of knowledge about the origin of his people from that book.

An only child, Momaday learned at an early age to give free reign to his imagination-or as he states, "to create my society in my mind." His mother encouraged him to learn English as his native language, and this sometimes made him feel uncertain about his cultural identity. Figures from European literature blended into his Indian surroundings. He writes that as a child he once perceived the shadow of Grendel, the monster in the Old English epic Beowulf, on the walls of Canyon de Chelly, an ancient Native American trade center and ceremonial town in Arizona. Similarly, he once believed he saw English novelist Charles Dickens's hero David Copperfield at a local trading post.

When he was twelve years old, Momaday's family moved to the Pueblo village of Jemez in northern New Mexico. Momaday remembers "not being able to imagine a more beautiful or exotic place." Many details from his life there pop up in his later writings.

Momaday enrolled at the University of New Mexico in 1952. He earned a bachelor's degree in political science in 1958. Taking a one-year break from his studies, he taught school on the Jicarilla Apache reservation before pursuing graduate studies in literature. During his years as an undergraduate student, Momaday distinguished himself as a writer and a public speaker, receiving the John Hay Whitney Fellowship in creative poetry writing and the Stanford Wilson Dissertation Fellowship at Stanford University.

While at Stanford, Momaday met famed scholar Yvor Winters, who later became a close friend and adviser. Momaday obtained his master's degree in 1960 and his Ph.D. three years later. In 1965, he published his first book, The Complete Poems of Frederick Goddard Tuckerman, which was based on his doctoral dissertation.

Following his graduate studies, Momaday became an assistant professor of English at the University of California at Santa Barbara (UCSB) in 1963. He remained at UCSB until 1969, except for spending the 1966 to 1967 academic year doing literary research at Harvard University. In 1969, he became professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley, where he taught creative writing and introduced a new curriculum (a set of courses specializing in a particular field) centered around American Indian literature and mythology.

The prize-winning novelist

Momaday's academic pursuits did not hinder his creative writing. In 1968, he published his influential novel, House Made of Dawn. The story follows the adventures of Abel, a Native American World War II veteran who attempts to balance his identity between Native and non-Native cultures. Unable to exist peacefully in either culture, Abel feels lost and returns to the reservation to try to heal himself. In 1969, House Made of Dawn received one of literature's highest honors, the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

Momaday's next novel, The Way to Rainy Mountain (1969), blends several Kiowa myths and legends. The book is a semi-fictional account of the tribe's migration from the Yellowstone region-where the Kiowa originated-to the plains, where they learned to domesticate horses and developed into a sophisticated society. Momaday retells the legend of how the Kiowas came into the world through a hollow log. When they entered it, he writes, "there was a woman whose body was swollen up with child, and she got stuck in the log. After that, no one could get through, and that is why the Kiowas are a small tribe in numbers." The Way to Rainy Mountain features illustrations by Momaday's father, Alfred. A reviewer for Choice magazine called it "a beautiful book-honest, unique, dignified, and told with a simplicity that approaches the purest poetry.... It is a book for all seasons, for all readers."

Momaday's reputation has continued to grow and spread throughout the world. In 1979, he was awarded Italy's highest literary award, the Premio Lettario Internationale "Mondello." In 1990, he was selected as a keynote speaker before the Conference on Environment and Human Survival, the Global Forum, and the Supreme Soviet in Moscow. That same year, he was asked to be a member of the Pulitzer Prize Jury in fiction.

Momaday then published two volumes of poetry- Angle of Geese and Other Poems (1974) and The Gourd Dancer (1976). Momaday draws inspiration for much of his poetry from nature, his native Southwest, and his Indian heritage. Many critics consider "Angle of Geese" and "The Bear" to be among Momaday's best works. John Finlay of Southern Review wrote of Angle of Geese: "Angle of Geese, made up of eighteen poems, three of which are in prose, is by far the greatest thing Momaday has done and should, by itself, earn for him a permanent place in our literature."

Momaday next wrote The Names: A Memoir (1976). Some critics consider this book an extension of The Way to Rainy Mountain. In the book, Momaday relates his personal experiences from childhood and adolescence through associative story fragments, stream-of-consciousness passages, poems, and other writings. Wallace Stegner, in a review for the New York Times, called Momaday's memoir a "mystical, provocative book." Jack W. Marken of American Indian Quarterly wrote that "the book is closely related to all other major works by Momaday. In all of them, he transmutes memories into art." Through his storytelling, Momaday also reveals what it was like to grow up as a Native American in the United States.

Several years passed before Momaday wrote another book. His next work, The Ancient Child (1989), was a novel. For the book, Momaday again called on his own experiences and interests. As he told Charles L. Woodward in Ancestral Voice: Conversations with N. Scott Momaday, the novel "is about the boy who turns into a bear, and in a sense I am writing about myself. I'm not writing an autobiography, but I am imagining a story that proceeds out of my own experience of the bear power. It is full of magic."

Momaday next wrote In the Presence of the Sun: A Gathering of Shields (1991) and In the Presence of the Sun: Stories and Poems, 1961-1991 (1992). Barbara Bode, in her New York Times book review, called the collection "a refined brew of origins, journeys, dreams and the landscape of the deep continental interior." In 1994, Momaday penned a book called Circle of Wonder: A Native American Christmas Story. He followed that book with The Man Made of Words: Essays, Stories, Passages in 1997. The book includes stories, vignettes, and essays that span three decades of the author's life, as well as accounts of his world travels. Two years later, Momaday published In the Bear's House, which includes some of the author's poetry, prose, and artwork. Momaday also is the author of play called The Indolent Boys.

In addition to his writing, Momaday was featured in the award-winning documentary called Remembered Earth: New Mexico's High Desert. The author also was featured in The West, a documentary by Ken Burns and Stephen Ives. In the documentary, Momaday recounts Kiowa history and legend. Momaday is featured in the PBS documentary Battle of Little Bighorn as well.

Momaday has received a number of awards and honors for his writing since his Pulitzer Prize-winning book, House Made of Dawn. In 1992, he received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Native Writers's Circle of the Americas. Then in 2007, President George W. Bush awarded him a National Medal of Arts. Momaday was a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, and is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He also has received the Golden Plate Award from the American Academy of Achievement, an Academy of American Poets Prize, and an award from the National Institute of Arts and Letters. In 2010, Momaday received an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters from the University of Illinois at Chicago. He holds several other honorary degrees from various colleges and universities around the country, including Yale University and the University of Massachusetts.

In addition to his writing, Momaday has spent a number of years in academia. As of 2011, he was still listed as a faculty member at the University of Arizona, where he is a Regents Professor of English. Momaday also established the Rainy Mountain Foundation and Buffalo Trust, a nonprofit that works to preserve native cultures. He was a founding trustee of the National Museum of the American Indian and is a member of a dance society called the Kiowa Gourd Clan. Momaday is an accomplished illustrator and painter as well, and his books often include both his writing and artwork. Momaday is the father of four children, including the actress Jill Scott Momaday.

FURTHER READINGS:

Choice, September 1969.

Momaday, N. Scott, The Ancient Child, New York: Doubleday, 1989.

Momaday, N. Scott, Angle of Geese and Other Poems, Boston: David R. Grodine, 1974.

Momaday, N. Scott, Conversations with N. Scott Momaday, edited by Matthias Schubnell, University Press of Mississippi, 1997.

Momaday, N. Scott, The Gourd Dancer, New York: Harper & Row, 1976.

Momaday, N. Scott, House Made of Dawn, New York: Harper & Row, 1968.

Momaday, N. Scott, In the Presence of the Sun: A Gathering of Shields, New York: St. Martin's Press, 1992.

Momaday, N. Scott, The Names: A Memoir, New York: Harper & Row, 1976.

Momaday, N. Scott, The Way to Rainy Mountain, Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1969.

Nation, June 30, 1997, p. 31.

New York Times Book Review, June 9, 1968.

Shubnell, Matthias, N. Scott Momaday: The Cultural and Literary Background, Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1985.

Source Citation

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Born: February 27, 1934 in Lawton, Oklahoma, United States Other Names: Mammedatty, Novarro Scotte; Momaday, Navarre Scott; Tsoai-talee; Rock Tree Boy "Some of my mother's memories have become my own. This is the real burden of the blood; this is immortality." One of the most distinguished Native American authors writing today, N.

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N. Scott Momaday is Native American and he doesn’t support the American Dream Because he doesn’t advocate the American Dream and the progress of the wealth. Redefines the American Dream as the ability to move forward into the future while remaining grounded and strengthened by one's traditional past.

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for House Made of Dawn by N. Scott Momaday

The magnificent Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of a proud stranger in his native land. He was a young American Indian named Abel, and he lived in two worlds. One was that of his father, wedding him to the rhythm of the seasons, the harsh beauty of the land, the ecstasy of the drug called peyote. The other was the world of the twentieth century, goading him into a compulsive cycle of sexual exploits, dissipation, and disgust. Home from a foreign war, he was a man being torn apart, a man descending into hell.

Publisher description retrieved from Google Books.

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TeachingBooks Book Descriptions | House Made of Dawn

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for House Made of Dawn by N. Scott Momaday The magnificent Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of a proud stranger in his native land. He was a young American Indian named Abel, and he lived in two worlds. One was that of his father, wedding him to the rhythm of the seasons, the harsh beauty of the land, the ecstasy of the drug called peyote.

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N. Scott Momaday, a poet and novelist of Kiowa descent, learns that his grandmother, Aho, has died. She is buried near Rainy Mountain, Oklahoma, and Momaday wants to visit her grave. He decides to make the journey the long way—by following the ancient migration route of the Kiowas, from their original homeland near the headwaters of the Yellowstone River east to the Black Hills and then south to Oklahoma. During this migration, the Kiowas had acquired horses and the Sun Dance religion. Their warrior society once dominated the southern Great Plains. Scott Momaday's The Way to Rainy Mountain does not advocate the usual definition of the American Dream as social mobility and progress in wealth. Rather, it redefines the American Dream as the ability to move forward into the future while remaining grounded and strengthened by one's traditional past.

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Audiobook Excerpt narrated by Darrell Dennis

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Audiobook Excerpt narrated by Darrell Dennis

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He’s talking about how he spent his life at the farm and how he grow up back in the day. He says that he wrote books and novels for his career. That’s how he became famous.Yes, because he doesn’t support the American Dream and doesn't want to follow it and want. He had done so much work that he’s family had free time with him and he didn’t have to work all day. He wrote so many books and got awards for it.  He got his masters degree. The years immediately following World War II were critical at Jemez and in the Indian world generally. A generation of young men and women were taken from their traditional world and placed in an alien world at war.

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In striving to enrich the lives of all readers, TeachingBooks supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.

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Momaday, N. Scott. “Book Description.” TeachingBooks Book Descriptions | House Made of Dawn, www.teachingbooks.net/annotations.cgi?id=3183#t_cid_gbs.

https://go.gale.com/ps/retrieve.do?tabID=Biographies&resultListType

Momaday, N. Scott. “Book Description.” TeachingBooks Book Descriptions | House Made of Dawn, www.teachingbooks.net/annotations.cgi?id=3183#t_cid_gbs.