N. Scott Momaday
| N. Scott Momaday | |
|---|---|
N. Scott Momaday (left) receiving the National Medal of Arts from U.S. president George W. Bush in 2007
|
|
| Born | February 27, 1934 Lawton, Oklahoma, United States |
| Occupation | Writer |
| Nationality | Kiowa |
| Alma mater | University of New Mexico (B.A.) Stanford University (Ph.D.) |
| Genre | Fiction |
| Literary movement | Native American Renaissance |
| Notable works | House Made of Dawn (1969) |
Navarre Scott Momaday (born February 27, 1934) — known as N. Scott Momaday — is a Native American author of Kiowa descent. His work House Made of Dawn was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1969. Momaday received the National Medal of Arts in 2007 for his work that celebrated and preserved Native American oral and art tradition. He holds 20 honorary degrees from colleges and universities, and is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Momaday also has a passion for drawing and painting and his work has been exhibited throughout the United States. Also, some of his books have his own illustrations in them.
Momaday is considered the founding author in what critic Kenneth Lincoln has termed the Native American Renaissance.
House Made of Dawn is considered a classic in Native American Literature. Since 1982, he has lived in Tucson and has taught at the University of Arizona. He is also currently married to Regina Heitzer and has been since 1979.
Contents
Background
N. Scott Momaday is the son of Alfred Morris who was born and raised on the Kiowa and was a painter. N. Scott Momaday's mother Mayme Natachee was English and Cherokee decent and was an author of children's books. Both parents worked as teachers on the reservation. This exposed Momaday to the Kiowa traditions and culture and developed his interest in literature, especially literature at an early age. He was initiated into the Gourd Dance society, the ancient fraternal organization of the Kiowa. ("Poet N. Scott Momaday." Poets.org. Academy of American Poets, n.d. Web. 29 May 2016.)
Momaday was born on 27 February 1934 at the Kiowa-Comanche Indian Hospital in Lawton, Oklahoma, South Central United States.When Momaday was 1 year old, his parents moved to Arizona which left Momaday to live at his grandparents home."Scott Momaday Biography." -- Academy of Achievement. N.p., 23 Jan. 2008. Web. 29 May 2016.
He is enrolled in the Kiowa Tribe of Oklahoma
Literary career
Momaday received his Ph.D. from Stanford University in 1963. Momaday's doctoral thesis, The Complete Poems of Frederick Goddard Tuckerman, was published in 1965.
His novel House Made of Dawn led to the breakthrough of Native American literature into the American mainstream after the novel was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1969.
House Made of Dawn was the first novel of the Native American Renaissance, a term coined by literary critic Kenneth Lincoln in the Native American Renaissance.
"The Way to Rainy Mountain" is a collection of Kiowa tales illustrated by his father.
The work remains a classic of Native American literature.
Academic career
Momaday has taught at the Universities of Stanford, Arizona, UC Berkeley, and UC Santa Barbara, and has been a visiting professor at Columbia, Princeton, and in Moscow. At UC Berkeley, he designed the graduate program for Indian Studies. Momaday left Berkeley for Stanford in 1973. Momaday also taught a year on Apache reservation at Jicarilla. [1]
He was a Visiting Professor at the University of New Mexico during the 2014-15 academic year to teach in the Creative Writing and American Literary Studies Programs in the Department of English. Specializing in poetry and the Native oral tradition, he will teach The Native American Oral Tradition.
Bibliography
- The Journey of Tai-me (1967), folklore
- House Made of Dawn (1968), novel
- The Way to Rainy Mountain (1969) (illustrated by his father, Alfred Momaday), folklore
- Angle of Geese (1974), poetry chapbook
- The Gourd Dancer (1976), poetry
- The Names: A Memoir (1976), memoir
- The Ancient Child (1989), novel
- In the Presence of the Sun (1992), stories and poetry
- The Native Americans: Indian County (1993)
- The Indolent Boys (Play) Premiered on the Syracuse Stage during the 1993-94 season.[2]
- Circle of Wonder: A Native American Christmas Story (1994), children's book
- The Man Made of Words: Essays, Stories, Passages (1997), stories and essays
- In the Bear's House (1999), mixed media
- Four Arrows & Magpie: A Kiowa Story (2006), children's book
- Three Plays: The Indolent Boys, Children of the Sun, and The Moon in Two Windows (2007), plays
- Again the Far Morning: New and Selected Poems (2011), poetry
Awards
In 1969, Momaday won the Pulitzer Prize for his novel "House Made of Dawn" (pulitzer.org).
Momaday was featured in the Ken Burns and Stephen Ives documentary, The West (1996), for his masterful retelling of Kiowa history and legend. He was also featured in PBS documentaries concerning boarding schools, Billy the Kid, and the Battle of the Little Bighorn.
Momaday was honored as the Oklahoma Centennial Poet Laureate[3]
In 1992, Momaday received the first Lifetime Achievement Award from the Native Writers' Circle of the Americas.[4]
Awarded a National Medal of Arts in 2007 by President George W. Bush.[5]
Momaday received an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters from the University of Illinois at Chicago on May 9, 2010.
Momaday won a poetry fellowship to the creative writing program at Stanford University (1963).
Recent activities
Momaday is the founder of the Rainy Mountain Foundation[6] and Buffalo Trust, a nonprofit organization working to preserve Native American cultures.[7] Momaday, a known watercolor painter, designed and illustrated the book, In the Bear's House.
Quotes
- "I sometimes think the contemporary white American is more culturally deprived than the Indian."[8]
- "I simply kept my goal in mind and persisted. Perseverance is a large part of writing."[8]
- "My father was a great storyteller and he knew many stories from the Kiowa oral tradition." ("N. Scott Momaday Keeper of the Flame" PBS. PBS, n.d. Web. 29 May 2016.)
- "He told me many of these stories over and over because I loved them. But it was only after I became an adult that I understood how fragile they are, because they exist only by word of mouth, always just one generation away from extinction. That’s when I began to write down the tales my father and others had told me" ("N. Scott Momaday Keeper of the Flame." PBS. PBS, n.d. Web. 29 May 2016.)
See also
- List of writers from peoples indigenous to the Americas
- Native American Renaissance
- Native American Studies
Notes
- ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
- ↑ Syracuse Stage 1993-94
- ↑ Van Deventer, M. J. "Bush adding to poet's honors." Daily Oklahoman. 15 Nov 2007 (retrieved 14 Dec 2009)
- ↑ List of NWCA Lifetime Achievement Awards, accessed 6 Aug 2010.
- ↑ President Bush Announces 2007 National Medal of Arts and National Humanities Medal Recipients
- ↑ "Santa Fe NM 87505 - Tax Exempt Organizations." Tax Exempt World. (retrieved 14 Dec 2009)
- ↑ Staff, January 2009, "N. Scott Momaday", Smithsonian Q&A, Vol. 39, Issue 10, 25 pgs., retrieved 04-25-2009
- ↑ 8.0 8.1 "N. Scott Momaday, PhD." Academy of Achievement. (retrieved 14 Dec 2009)
External links
- Works by or about N. Scott Momaday in libraries (WorldCat catalog)
- N. Scott Momaday from the Modern American Poetry site
- The Buffalo Trust - Momaday's non-profit charitable foundation
- Perspectives in American Literature - Momaday Bibliography
- Interview with Momaday
- Article about Momaday's selection as Poet Laureate of Oklahoma
- "N. Scott Momaday" by Martha Scott Trimble in the Western Writers Series Digital Editions
- Voices of Oklahoma interview with N. Scott Momaday. First person interview conducted with N. Scott Momaday on December 10, 2010. Original audio and transcript archived with Voices of Oklahoma oral history project.
- Native paths: American Indian art from the collection of Charles and Valerie Diker, an exhibition catalog from The Metropolitan Museum of Art (fully available online as PDF), which contains an essay by N. Scott Momaday (see table of contents)
- 1934 births
- Living people
- 20th-century American novelists
- 21st-century American novelists
- American male novelists
- Kiowa people
- Native American novelists
- American people of Cherokee descent
- People from Lawton, Oklahoma
- Postmodern writers
- Pulitzer Prize for Fiction winners
- United States National Medal of Arts recipients
- Guggenheim Fellows
- Native American essayists
- University of California, Santa Barbara faculty
- Male essayists
