House Made of Dawn, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1969, tells the story of a young American Indian named Abel, home from a foreign war and caught between two worlds: one his father's, wedding him to the rhythm of the seasons and the harsh beauty of the land; the other of industrial America, a goading him into a compulsive cycle of dissipation and disgust. Distributed by Syndetic Solutions, Inc.

A member of the Kiowa tribe, Momaday was born in Oklahoma but grew up on reservations in the Southwest. He was educated at the University of New Mexico and Stanford University, and later taught at Berkeley, Stanford, and the University of Arizona. Momaday lives two lives as a professor of English and Comparative Literature and as a Kiowa tribal dancer and recorder of the Native American experience in this country. "None but an Indian, I think," he has said, "knows so much what it is like to have existence in two worlds and security in neither." This is a theme that runs through his fiction and nonfiction, including his Pulitzer prize winning first novel, House Made of Dawn (1968). Yet, as a Native American and a writer, Momaday finds two sources of identity the land and the language. The former gives strength to the American Indian, whose sense of identification comes from a closeness to the land. The latter connects humankind to ourselves and our world. "Man's idea of himself" finds "old and essential being in language," Momaday has written. Acts of naming, of remembering these are "legendary as well as historical, personal as well as cultural."

(Bowker Author Biography) Navarre Scott Momaday was born on February 27, 1934 in Lawton, Okla. to Kiowa parents who successfully bridged the gap between Native American and white ways, but remained true to their heritage. Momaday attended the University of New Mexico and earned an M.A and a Ph.D. from Stanford University in 1963. A member of the Gourd Dance Society of the Kiowa Tribe, Momaday has received a plethora of writing accolades, including the Academy of American Poets prize for The Bear and the 1969 Pulitzer Prize for fiction for House Made of Dawn. He also shared the Western Heritage Award with David Muench in 1974 for the nonfiction book Colorado: Summer/Fall/Winter/Spring, and he is the author of the film adaptation of Frank Water's novel, The Man Who Killed the Deer. His work, The Names is composed of tribal tales, boyhood memories, and family histories. Another book, The Way to Rainy Mountain, melds myth, history, and personal recollection into a Kiowa tribe narrative. Throughout his writings, Momaday celebrate his Kiowa Native American heritage in structure, theme, and subject matter, often dealing with the man-nature relationship as a central theme and sustaining the Indian oral tradition.

N. Scott Momaday is Professor of English, University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona.

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