Momaday, N(avarre) Scott (1934– )

US writer of Kiowa descent. He won the Pulitzer Prize for his novel House Made of Dawn (1968) about a young American Indian alienated from both white and his ancestral society. In his second novel, Ancient Child (1989), the protagonist is Set (Kiowa for bear), an adopted Kiowa-Anglo. Momaday was professor of English at Stanford University 1972–81.

Momaday's collections of poetry include Angle of Geese and Other Poems (1974), The Gourd Dancer (1976), In the Presence of the Sun (1992), and the poetry section of In the Bear's House (1999). They all reflect Kiowa and Navajo influences in particular and the general importance of the native oral literatures, celebrated in his collection of essays The Man Made of Words (1997). His autobiographical books, The Way to Rainy Mountain (1969) and The Names: A Memoir (1976), emphasize the importance of the Kiowa landscape and his father's tribal heritage.