House Made of Dawn

House Made of Dawn is a 1968 novel by Kiowa and American writer N. Scott Momaday, widely credited as leading the way for the breakthrough of Native American literature into the mainstream. It was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1969, and has also been noted for its significance in Native American anthropology.

Background

With 198 pages, House Made of Dawn was conceived first as a series of poems, and then replanned as stories, and finally shaped into a novel. It is based largely on Momaday's firsthand knowledge of life at Jemez Pueblo. Like the novel's protagonist, Abel, Momaday lived both inside and outside of mainstream society, growing up on reservations and later attending school and teaching at major universities. In the novel Momaday combines his personal experiences with his imagination—something his father, Al Momaday, and his mother taught him to do, according to his memoir The Names.

Details in the novel correspond to real-life occurrences. According to one of Momaday's letters:

<blockquote>Abel is a composite of the boys I knew at Jemez. I wanted to say something about them. An appalling number of them are dead; they died young, and they died violent deaths. One of them was drunk and run over. Another was drunk and froze to death. (He was the best runner I ever knew.) One man was murdered, butchered by a kinsman under a telegraph pole just east of San Isidro. And yet another committed suicide. A good many who have survived this long are living under the Relocation Program in Los Angeles, Chicago, Detroit, etc. They're a sad lot of people.</blockquote>

According to one historian, the novel is highly accurate in its portrayal of a peyote service, though in southern California such services normally take place in the desert, not the city.

In 1972, an independent feature film based on House Made of Dawn by Richardson Morse was released. Momaday and Morse wrote the script. Larry Littlebird starred. Considered a "classic", the National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) went to great efforts to preserve the film, now housing all film elements in its film and media archives, which provide study copies. The many critics—such as Carole Oleson in her "The Remembered Earth: Momaday's House Made of Dawn", South Dakota Review II (Spring 1973)—who have given the novel extended analysis acknowledge that much more explanation is needed "before outsiders can fully appreciate all the subtleties of House Made of Dawn". Baine Kerr has elaborated this point to suggest that Momaday has used "the modern Anglo novel [as] a vehicle for a sacred text", that in it he is "attempting to transliterate Indian culture, myth, and sensibility into an alien art form, without loss".

However, some commentators have been more critical. In reviewing the "disappointing" novel for Commonweal (September 20, 1968), William James Smith chastised Momaday for his mannered style: "[He] writes in a lyric vein that borrows heavily from some of the slacker rhythms of the King James Bible ... It makes you itch for a blue pencil to knock out all the intensified words that maintain the soporific flow." Other critics said it was nothing but "an interesting variation of the old alienation theme"; "a social statement rather than ... a substantial artistic achievement"; "a memorable failure"; "a reflection, not a novel in the comprehensive sense of the word" with "awkward dialogue and affected description"; "a batch of dazzling fragments".

Overall, the book has come to be seen as a success. Sprague concluded in his article that the novel was superb, and Momaday was widely praised for the novel's rich description of Indian life. Now there is a greater recognition of Momaday's fictional art, and critics have come to recognise its unique achievement as a novel. Despite a qualified reception the novel had succeeded in making its impact even on earlier critics though they were not sure of their own responses. They found it "a story of considerable power and beauty", "strong in imaginative imagery", creating a "world of wonder and exhilarating vastness". In more recent criticism there are signs of greater clarity of understanding of Momaday's achievement. In his review (which appeared in Western American Literature 5, Spring 1970), John Z. Bennett had pointed out how through "a remarkable synthesis of poetic mode and profound emotional and intellectual insight into the Indians' perduring human status" Momaday's novel becomes at last the very act it is dramatizing, an artistic act, a "creation hymn".

Awards

Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, 1969

Influence

Critic Kenneth Lincoln identified the Pulitzer for House Made of Dawn as the moment that sparked the Native American Renaissance. Many major American Indian novelists (e.g. Paula Gunn Allen, Leslie Marmon Silko, Gerald Vizenor, James Welch, Sherman Alexie and Louise Erdrich) have cited the novel as a significant inspiration for their own work.

Publishers

Originally published by Harper & Row, editions have subsequently been brought out by HarperCollins, the Penguin Group, Econo-Clad Books and the University of Arizona Press.

Release details

1968, US, Harper & Row (), Pub date ? ? 1968, hardback (First edition)
1989, US, Borgo Press (), Pub date ? October 1989, hardback
1989, US, SOS Free Stock (), Pub date ? October 1989, paperback
1996, US, University of Arizona Press (), Pub date ? September 1996, hardback
1999, US, HarperCollins (), Pub date ? August 1999, hardback
2000, US, McGraw Hill Higher Education (), Pub date 1 June 2000, paperback