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“Both a masterpiece about the universal human condition and a masterpiece of Native American literature. . . . A book everyone should read for the joy and emotion of the language it contains.” — The Paris Review A special 50th anniversary edition of the magnificent Pulitzer Prize-winning novel from renowned Kiowa writer and poet N. Scott Momaday, with a new preface by the author A young Native American, Abel has come home from war to find himself caught between two worlds. The first is the world of his father’s, wedding him to the rhythm of the seasons, the harsh beauty of the land, and the ancient rites and traditions of his people. But the other world—modern, industrial America—pulls at Abel, demanding his loyalty, trying to claim his soul, and goading him into a destructive, compulsive cycle of depravity and disgust. An American classic, House Made of Dawn is at once a tragic tale about the disabling effects of war and cultural separation, and a hopeful story of a stranger in his native land, finding his way back to all that is familiar and sacred.
His first novel since House Made of Dawn, Momaday's The Ancient Child is a novel about storytelling and myths, about how we create them, and their essential place in our lives.
The Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist recalls the significant events and ventures of his own life, his own land, and his own people, recreating his experiences as an American Indian and those of his relatives
First published in paperback by UNM Press in 1976, The Way to Rainy Mountain has sold over 200,000 copies. "The paperback edition of The Way to Rainy Mountain was first published twenty-five years ago. One should not be surprised, I suppose, that it has remained vital, and immediate, for that is the nature of story. And this is particularly true of the oral tradition, which exists in a dimension of timelessness. I was first told these stories by my father when I was a child. I do not know how long they had existed before I heard them. They seem to proceed from a place of origin as old as the earth. "The stories in The Way to Rainy Mountain are told in three voices. The first voice is the voice of my father, the ancestral voice, and the voice of the Kiowa oral tradition. The second is the voice of historical commentary. And the third is that of personal reminiscence, my own voice. There is a turning and returning of myth, history, and memoir throughout, a narrative wheel that is as sacred as language itself."--from the new Preface
N. Scott Momaday, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of House Made of Dawn (1969) and National Medal of Arts awardee, is the elder statesman of Native American literature and a major twentieth-century American author. This volume marks the most comprehensive resource available on Momaday. Along with an insightful new biography, it offers extensive, up-to-date bibliographies of his own work and the work of others about him. Phyllis Morgan's account of Momaday's life and career and her chronology of his accomplishments, including his many awards and honors, are based on wide-ranging research and recent interviews in which she elicited Momaday's thoughts on topics and periods of his life that he has...
"In the Presence of the Sun presents 30 years of selected works by [N. Scott] Momaday, the well-known Southwest Native American novelist. His unadorned poetry, which recounts fables and rituals of the Kiowa nation, conveys the deep sense of place of the Native American oral tradition. Here are dream-songs about animals (bear, bison, terrapin) and life away from urban alienation, an imagined re-creation based on Billy the Kid, prose poems about Plains Shields (and a fascinating discussion of their background), and new poems that utilize primary colors ('forms of the earth') to express instinctive continuities of a pre-Columbian vision."--Library Journal "The strong, spare beauty of In the Presence of the Sun is compelling evidence that Scott Momaday is one of the most versatile and distinguished artists in America today."--Peter Matthiessen ". . . the images, the voices, the people are shadowy, elusive, burning with invention, like flames against a dark sky. For behind them is always the artist-author himself . . . a man with a sacred investiture. Strong medicine, strong art indeed."--The New York Times Book Review
This precursor to The Way to Rainy Mountain was originally published in a handmade edition in 1967 and has never before been commercially available.
Collects the author's writings on sacred geography, Billy the Kid, actor Jay Silverheels, ecological ethics, Navajo place names, and old ways of knowing.
When his first novel House Made of Dawn was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1969, N. Scott Momaday was virtually unknown. Today he is the most acclaimed Native American writer, working at the peak of his creative power and gaining stature also as an important painter. His first retrospective was held in 1993 at the Wheel-wright Museum in Santa Fe. The son of a Kiowa artist and a Cherokee-Anglo mother, Momaday synthesizes multiple cultural influences in his writing and painting. While much of his attention focuses on the challenging task of reconciling ancient traditions with modern reality, his work itself is an example of how the best of the Indian and non-Indian worlds can be arr...
Although highly regarded as a writer of fiction, nonfiction, and drama, N. Scott Momaday considers himself primarily a poet. This first book of his poems to be published in over a decade, Again the Far Morning comprises a varied selection of new work along with the best from his four earlier books of poems: Angle of Geese (1974), The Gourd Dancer (1976), In the Presence of the Sun (1992), and In the Bear’s House (1999). To read Momaday’s poems from the last forty years is to understand that his focus on Kiowa traditions and other American Indian myths is further evidence of his spectacular formal accomplishments. His early syllabic verse, his sonnets, and his mastery of iambic pentameter are echoed in more recent work, and prose poetry has been part of his oeuvre from the beginning. The new work includes the elegies and meditations on mortality that we expect from a writer whose career has been as long as Momaday’s, but it also includes light verse and sprightly translations of Kiowa songs.