Navarre Scott Momaday
| N. Scott Momaday | |
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N. Scott Momaday (left) receiving the National Medal of Arts from U.S. president George W. Bush in 2007
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| Born | Navarre Scott Momaday 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 Kiowa novelist, short story writer, essayist, and poet. His novel House Made of Dawn was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1969, and is considered the first major work of the Native American Renaissance. His follow-up work The Way to Rainy Mountain blended folklore with memoir. Momaday received the National Medal of Arts in 2007 for his work's celebration and preservation of indigenous oral and art tradition. He holds twenty honorary degrees from colleges and universities, and is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
On February 27, 1934, Navarre Scott Momaday was born in Lawton, Oklahoma. He was delivered in the Kiowa and Comanche Indian Hospital, registered as having seven-eighths Indian blood. N. Scott Momaday was born of Natachee Scott Momaday, of mixed English, Irish, French, and Cherokee blood, while his father, Alfred Morris Momaday was full-blooded Kiowa. His mother was a writer and his father a painter. In 1935, when N. Scott Momaday was one year old, his family moved to Arizona, where both his father and mother became teachers on the reservation. Growing up in Arizona allowed Momaday to experience not only his father’s Kiowa traditions but also those of other southwest Native Americans including the Navajo, Apache, and Pueblo traditions. In 1946, a twelve-year-old Momaday moved to Jemez Pueblo, New Mexico, living there with his parents until his senior year of high school. After high school, Momaday attended the University of New Mexico, graduating in 1958 with a Bachelors of Arts degree in English. He continued his education at Stanford University where, in 1963, he was awarded a Ph.D. in English Literature.
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.
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