Momaday at Work
GETTING ESTABLISHED
By the time House Made of Dawn was published in the spring of 1968, a revised version of Momaday’s doctoral dissertation had already been published as The Complete Poems of Frederick Goddard Tuckerman; several of his poems, stories, and sketches had appeared in various literary journals; and he had had privately printed The Journey of Tai-me (1967), a collection of Kiowa tales that he later worked into The Way to Rainy Mountain. But House Made of Dawn was Momaday’s first major literary publication, and it constituted a major breakthrough for him. As he said in one interview, “it was a little hard to follow that act, you know, because here a first novel, and a first novel by an Indian, was given a major prize.”1
Momaday first conceived of House Made of Dawn as a book-length poem, and he had been working on it for several years in verse before it took final shape as a novel. By the time he submitted a draft to an editor for consideration, he had already published several prose pieces that eventually became part of the final manuscript. In an interview with Joelle Rostkowski, Momaday recalled that he began the novel during “a happy and creative period” in his life. He had been writing poetry, but he noted that he wanted to work in another genre: “I felt the need to expand myself, to extend the scope of my literary work.”2
In February 1966, Frances McCullough, an editor at Harper and Row who had been a student with Momaday at Stanford University, invited him to submit a collection of poetry. McCullough had been editor of the Stanford student literary magazine, Sequoia, and, remembering Momaday’s poetry from their graduate-school days, she speculated that he might have a collection ready for publication. He said that he did not, that he had neglected poetry for prose, but that he did have a novel in progress. He asked if she would be interested in that, and she said that she was. McCullough asked Momaday to submit his manuscript for the Harper Prize Novel contest, but, after seeing this early version of the novel, she advised him not to rush the unrevised manuscript to meet the prize deadline; rather, she suggested that he rewrite it. According to Matthias Schubnell, the editor “was particularly critical of the fragmentary structure and lack of cohesion of the early drafts.” In her correspondence, in fact, McCullough expressed her concern that readers might have trouble with several of the pueblo scenes in the novel. Schubnell notes that she specifically cited the descriptions of the pueblo ceremonials, the characterization of an albino Indian who seems to embody evil, and the “witchcraft theme” in general.3
Despite such concerns, however, the novel was published in the spring of 1968. To the surprise of many, according to Schubnell, this previously unknown Kiowa writer won the Pulitzer Prize in fiction in May of 1969. His winning the prize—especially considering the comparative obscurity of the novel—set Momaday up as an important American author, but his success (if not popularity) was perhaps assured with or without the Pulitzer. In 1969 both the University of New Mexico Press and the University of Oklahoma Press were seriously interested in his work in progress; the University of New Mexico Press published it that year as The Way to Rainy Mountain. Despite the prestige of the prizewinning novel, excerpts from this latter book appear in literary anthologies much more frequently than anything else Momaday has written. Together, these two texts—a groundbreaking novel and an innovative tribal and personal history—clearly established Momaday as a meticulous and sophisticated writer of national importance.
MOMADAY’S TECHNIQUES
According to Momaday, technique is of fundamental importance, and he is highly aware of it: “Technique is crucial. I find it almost impossible to write without an idea of the shape of the finished thing. And I’m very conscious of such things as symmetry in writing and balance. I try very hard to incorporate design in my writing.”4 In several of his interviews, conversations, and prefaces, Momaday has spoken of his techniques, his writing habits, and his philosophy of writing. He provides the details for an interesting picture from which one can acquire a relatively full and interesting sense of “the man made of words” at work. In an interview with Joelle Rostkowski, Momaday described his mental outline of House Made of Dawn: “I knew that behind the rather clearly defined, rational structure of linear time, I had to express myself through numerous flashbacks, shifting and contrasting voices, metaphorical language and go beyond the limitations of the chronological novel.”5
If the use of flashbacks is a fundamental technique in some sections of House Made of Dawn, other sections rely heavily on the techniques of contrasting voices and stream of consciousness. Like James Joyce in Ulysses (1922) and William Faulkner in The Sound and the Fury (1929), Momaday incorporates contrasting voices (different narrators) in the novel. Most notable is the switch to the perspective of Ben Benally, the best friend of the protagonist, Abel, in the third section of House Made of Dawn. Momaday thrusts the reader into the mind of Ben as he recounts his and Abel’s shared experiences in Los Angeles. Ben’s account is a first-person narration employing the stream-of-consciousness technique: the reader enters the mental and emotional consciousness of the narrator as he disjointedly remembers his friendship with Abel. Another innovative use of contrasting voices is seen in The Way to Rainy Mountain, in which Momaday moves between personal reminiscence and the voices of a tribal storyteller and a public historian.
The pictorial is a crucial element in almost all of Momaday’s published work. In The Ancient Child the four books take their names from pictorial art: planes, lines, shapes, and shadows. The fact that the character Set is an artist gives Momaday the chance to evoke the principles behind the creative acts of painting and writing. One of Set’s art instructors, for example, gives his student this advice: “you have to be always aware of the boundaries of the plane, and you have to make use of them. . . . You can affirm what is there. Art is affirmation.”6
Momaday’s philosophy of writing has shaped both his technique and his actual writing habits. As early as the mid 1980s he admitted to Charles L. Woodard that, although the bulk of his published work was prose, he still thought of himself as a poet.7 Momaday gave this advice on writing poetry in a 1972 interview with Lee Abbott: “write about what you know. Do write out of your experience, whatever the experience may be. . . . Write out of something that you have definite ideas and feelings about and be true to those feelings.” When asked in the same interview what he saw as an “indispensable ingredient in a work,” Momaday replied, “I would say honesty. You have to be true to yourself as a writer. You can’t write something that is untrue to your experience and get away with it.”8
In addition to being conscious of different techniques, Moma-day has always been eager to try out different genres: “I like to work in different forms. When I knew what it was to write a poem, I wanted to know what it was to write a novel, then a travel piece, then a film script, then a play.”9 This attitude helps to explain why he has written two novels, two autobiographical works (The Way to Rainy Mountain and The Names), several books of poetry, a collection of dialogues, a play (produced but not published), an illustrated children’s story, and several nonfiction pieces. From the beginning of his career, Momaday has experimented with form, technique, and genre. This experimentation with various genres accounts in part for his constant reuse of material from work to work. In a sense, Momaday reinvents the scene or episode not only in contextual and emotional ways but also formally. That is, a story told first as a poem may become a prose narrative, a drawing, or a paragraph in a novel.
In one of his conversations with Momaday, Woodard suggested that the author “tells and retells his ongoing story.”10 Thus, a piece of writing that seems to be the same episode or account from one work to the next actually appears in a new and different context, and that new context changes the impact and even the meaning of a particular piece. In this sense, Momaday’s art employs a technique similar to the method of telling in an oral tradition. One obvious example of this method is Momaday’s use of the introduction to The Way to Rainy Mountain as Tosamah’s Sunday sermon in House Made of Dawn. The same account of the Kiowa migration serves strikingly different purposes in the two works. Another important example of Momaday’s reuse of material is his playful employment of the Billy the Kid poems, which first appeared in The Ancient Child, presented as if written by Grey, a young Kiowa/Navajo cowgirl in the novel. Momaday republished the poems as a freestanding unit titled “The Strange and True Story of My Life with Billy the Kid” in In the Presence of the Sun: Stories and Poems, 1961–1991. In the novel, aspects of the plot and Grey’s own reflections on her writing are interspersed with the poems and prose passages that make up the history of Billy the Kid. For the republication of the history in In the Presence of the Sun, Momaday added a short introduction; all twenty-one poems and prose pieces that originally appeared in the novel are included. Naturally, references to Grey and situations from the novel are omitted.
Readers can turn to some of Momaday’s work to gain a sense of his technique and his philosophy of composition. In the poem “At Risk” (1992), for example, the speaker of the poem describes a method of com-position and then notes the significance of that method:
I played at words.
It was a long season.
Soft syllables,
Images that shimmered,
Intricate etymologies.
They cohered in wonder.
I was enchanted.
My soul was at risk.
I struggled
Towards hurt,
Towards healing,
Towards passion,
Towards peace.11
Although the poem appears to concern a literal, physical transformation, it is also suggestive of creating a poem, of the creative act itself. The suggestion is that in the act of artistic creation the artist must take important risks and that the act of creation is itself a form of transformation. Ideally, it is a transforming experience for both reader and writer.
For Momaday this creative process comes about through the imagination. Even when talking about being honest and writing from personal experience, he insists that the imagination plays a crucial role. He advises that one write out of one’s experience, “whatever the experience may be, whether imaginary or not.”12 Momaday makes the point explicitly and forcefully in his 1970 essay “The Man Made of Words.” As he tells the story, he had just finished (or thought he had finished) The Way to Rainy Mountain, when the one-hundred-year-old woman Ko-sahn—a long-dead Kiowa storyteller, a contemporary of his great-grandparents, whom he had once heard—appeared before him: “Then it was that that ancient, one-eyed woman Ko-sahn stepped out of the language and stood before me.” When the author-imaginer tells her she does not exist, she contradicts him, insisting that she does: “You see, I have existence, whole being, in your imagination. It is but one kind of being, to be sure, but it is perhaps the best of all kinds.” Indeed, Momaday’s ability to imagine gives meaning to his words. Looking over his writing in this instance, he remembers, “I could scarcely believe that they made sense, that they had anything whatsoever to do with meaning.” The words scarcely made sense, that is, until Ko-sahn emerged from the page, an emergence that “seemed to humanize the whole complexity of language.”13
In the 1972 interview with Abbott, Momaday talked about the schedule he kept at one time in his life: “at about seven o’clock, I would get to work and would work non-stop until one or two. That was a great schedule. I was very productive when I was doing that.” Although he has not always worked according to such a rigid schedule, he does believe that “a certain amount of routine is necessary to writing.” At another time he preferred getting up early and having coffee and reading the newspaper at a coffee shop before returning to his room to write. In the same interview he described his typical method of composing: “I write at the typewriter, which I do most of the time. I can also scribble things out in longhand. When I work at the typewriter, I always have a scratchpad with me and I do a lot of feeling out with a pencil, but I can compose pretty well on a typewriter.”14 Momaday switched from a typewriter to a computer, but otherwise his method remains the same. In a 1997 interview in The Albuquerque Tribune he said that he writes about three hours a day.15 In the interview with Abbott, Momaday also described the editing he does while working: “When you asked me how I evaluate my writing, I should have said before, I have to hear it, and so I babble a great deal at the typewriter. I read things to myself, and even when I don’t articulate them, I hear them in my mind, and this is one of the ways in which I can tell whether or not something I’ve written really satisfies me or not. It has to sound right to me.”16 In a 1993 interview Momaday noted that he still babbles constantly while writing: “And I try it that way. If I write something and I’m not quite sure what it is, I read it aloud to myself, and I get a better idea of what it is. That’s one of the ways in which I evaluate my work.”17
In the preface to In the Presence of the Sun, Momaday summarizes his method over several decades of writing: “I have been, from the time I was in my twenties, a productive artist, not a prolific one as I think of it, but neither a straggler.”18 He made a similar point earlier in a conversation with Woodard: “I’m slow. Just very slow as a writer and a reader. If you count everything, including my dissertation, which was published, and the books that I’ve done, there’s something like seven over a course of twenty to thirty years. That’s about my rate.”19
MOMADAY’S REVISING
Momaday stresses the importance of rewriting: “I do so much of the really important work in the rewriting that it’s very hard for me to get very far with the first draft. . . . When I rewrite, I delete very little. Because that’s all been done in the first process, but I rework a great deal, and I almost inevitably add a great deal when I rewrite.”20 In 1972, discussing his work on his memoir, The Names, Momaday confessed that he rewrote the first chapter several times before moving on, but then decided to write his “way through the book”: “I’m trying to convince myself that it will be better in the long run if I get all of the material down . . . then go back and polish.”21
In response to a question about his reviewers, Momaday commented in 1972 that he felt he had “been treated very well by the critics.” When asked whether or not critics were helpful, he responded in the affirmative but then vacillated: “They should be, but very few of them are.” Most of the reviews and critical responses to his works, he said, were not perceptive. But he corrected himself: “I’ve been fortunate in being reviewed by a few people who really were perceptive, and I learned something from their reviews. They gave me insights into my own writing that were valuable to me.” When pressed for specifics, however, he said that he could not give a “precise example.”22 If Momaday vacillated in these early opinions about critics, in a later interview he seemed to have reached a decision concerning their role. He said that in many instances critics simply did not understood what Indian literature was, “and so they have created false impressions of it and they have set down arbitrary rules for defining it.” He concluded that critics “don’t play much of a role in my work.”23 Momaday’s reaction to critics in general seems to be to ignore them, or at least to ignore their suggestions for revision. He certainly has never been prone to change his style according to critical commentary. Indeed, he maintains that the readers of his manuscripts usually miss the point altogether and certainly often miss the subtleties. Therefore, Momaday has not been prone to change either his style or his content according to their critical commentary.
Momaday’s confidence in his own style and method and his resistance to changing his style in response to criticism are perhaps most evident in the 1968 correspondence between him and his editor, Gus Blaisdell, during the preparation of The Way to Rainy Mountain. In reaction to one manuscript reader’s report, Momaday responded, “Most important, I want you to set the book up according to my judgment. Most of the suggestions in your editorial report disturb me a great deal; they seem designed in some instances to change my style. Ninety percent of X’s stuff is not only worthless; it’s silly. Silliness may be the most grievous sin of all. You must change only the things that I want changed” (Momaday’s emphasis).24 The author stood firm in his refusal to change the description of a cricket in the introduction to The Way to Rainy Mountain. In this particular passage he describes sitting outside on the stone steps of his grandmother’s house: “Once I looked at the moon and caught sight of a strange thing. A cricket had perched upon the handrail, only a few inches away from me. My line of vision was such that the creature filled the moon like a fossil. It had gone there, I thought, to live and die, for there, of all places, was its small definition made whole and eternal. A warm wind rose up and purled like the longing within me.”25 When an anonymous reader offered a revision of this passage, Momaday responded vehemently: “Leave it alone. You don’t seem to realize (as of course X doesn’t) that this is one of the great images in our literature. If you lay a hand on it, I will cut your heart out... . I give some thought to what I write; I consider the alternatives. In every detail, this image is exactly what I want.”26 Momaday convinced his editor, and the passage was published as he intended.
Even though Momaday resists revising according to critical response, he does revise his work according to his own criteria. Given the way he uses and reuses material, some of his strategies for revision can be determined, and they reveal how he puts his art together. A short story titled “The Well” (1963), for example, includes many elements that Momaday later worked into House Made of Dawn. As Schubnell has pointed out, this early story “contains a number of the themes and prototypes of some of the characters which were to reappear in the novel.”27 The protagonist of the story, Hobson, returns home to his reservation after a twelve-year absence and attempts to find a meaningful place for himself. He searches both the cultural and physical landscapes for some sign of recognition, but they have changed on him. Like Abel in House Made of Dawn, Hobson lacks the ability to express himself, and perhaps for this reason he is unable to enter into the tribal ceremonials. As in the subsequent novel, the protagonist of “The Well” is prone to drunkenness and violence. Indeed, the only person that he can relate to, finally, is an old witch-woman, Muñoz, a character who anticipates Nicol´s teah-whau in House Made of Dawn.
In a scene that, as Schubnell suggests, “anticipates Abel’s slaying of the albino in House Made of Dawn,”28 Munoz is stabbed by one of three drunk Indians who have been tormenting her: “Hobson saw the low gray arc as the blade flashed across the old woman’s middle.”29 Although the murder itself has little in common with the killing of Juan Reyes, the albino, the concluding paragraph of “The Well” does perhaps have a parallel in House Made of Dawn. Both the story and the novel end with a description of a black mesa. In the conclusion of the story Hobson walks away from the woman who has just been stabbed and looks at the sky: “The bright jagged line between the hills and the dark clouds was almost gone, but he could see one patch of pure color where there was a saddle on the skyline. There, like a small pool of water, was eternity.”30 In the novel Abel has informed Father Olguin of the death of Francisco (Abel’s maternal grandfather); like Hobson, he walks south: “A single cloud lay over the world, heavy and still. It lay out upon the black mesa, smudging out the margin and spilling over the lee. But at the saddle there was nothing. There was only the clear pool of eternity.”31
Like Hobson, Abel recalls herding sheep as a boy near the shack of an old woman (Muñoz in the story, Nicolás teah-whau in the novel) who was said to be a witch. Momaday took a passage from Hobson’s memories of herding near the old woman’s place and used it for Abel’s recollections in the novel: “He knew even then that it was only the wind, but it was a stranger sound than any he had ever known. And at the same time he saw the hole in the ground [rock in House Made of Dawn] where the wind dipped, struck, and rose. It was larger than a rabbit hole and partly concealed by the choke cherry which grew beside it. The moan of the wind grew loud. It filled him with dread. For the rest of his life it would be for him the particular sound of anguish.”32 With the exception of the change of the word ground to rock, Momaday reused this passage from “The Well” verbatim in the novel. Thus, even early in his career he used material that was never separate from or free of its past contexts but that was at the same time always new, ever richer.
In a short monograph on Momaday, Martha Scott Trimble mentions a few of Momaday’s short prose narratives or sketches that were first published in journals and then incorporated into House Made of Dawn. Although she does not make explicit comparisons between the sketches and sections of the novel, she does suggest that such comparisons show “that Momaday had carefully revised them to achieve greater clarity and precision.”33 Perhaps the fact that several parts of the novel had been previously published as short, self-contained narratives accounts for the fragmentary structure of House Made of Dawn. Three sketches published in The Southern Review in 1966, for example, became parts of the first major section of the novel, “The Longhair.” “The Sparrow and the Reed” became the first chapter (“July 20”), telling the story of Francisco’s ride along the river and his snaring of a sparrow in a trap he set for a male mountain bluebird. “Homecoming” made up some of the second chapter (“July 21”). “The Albino,” which became part of the fourth chapter (“July 25”), describes the albino as a “large and thickset, powerful and deliberate” man. This sketch describes one of the pueblo rituals, a ceremony in which a series of men on horseback attempt to pull a partially buried live chicken from the ground. Yvor Winters wrote, “The chicken-pull section is one of the most brilliant things I have ever read.”34
Two more sketches later included verbatim in House Made of Dawn first appeared in the New Mexico Quarterly in 1967. The first of these, “The Bear and the Colt,” became one of the stories Francisco tells shortly before he dies.35 The other, “The Eagles of the Valle Grande,” is an account of Abel’s experience with the Eagle Watcher’s Society, narrated early in the novel.36
CRITICAL RECEPTION
Even though Momaday was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1969 for House Made of Dawn, the novel did not receive the critical attention such an award would suggest it might. As Trimble notes, “there were relatively few reviews and critical materials published on House Made of Dawn.”37 The book came out in the spring of 1968; that spring and summer it received nine reviews in national publications. The next year, after the news of the Pulitzer, there were about six more reviews, and four more in 1970.
The first scholarly responses to House Made of Dawn began to appear in the early 1970s. For that decade the annual MLA International Bibliography of Books and Articles on the Modern Languages and Literatures listed twelve scholarly works on the novel, including one dissertation, which compares Jean Toomer’s novel Cane (1923) with House Made of Dawn. During the 1980s the bibliography listed twenty-three entries devoted to Momaday’s novel, including two dissertations. In the 1990s there were about two dozen articles on the novel. This ongoing critical attention to House Made of Dawn clearly indicates that Momaday is an important figure in American literature.
Several book-length studies and dissertations have been devoted to Momaday’s work exclusively. This trend began with Trimble’s brief study in the Boise State College Western Writers Series, N. Scott Momaday (1973). In 1985 Schubnell’s dissertation on Momaday was published as N. Scott Momaday: The Cultural and Literary Background. In 1988 Kenneth M. Roemer published a collection of essays, Approaches to Teaching Momaday’s The Way to Rainy Mountain. Woodard, the author of a 1975 dissertation on Momaday, published Ancestral Voice: Conversations with N. Scott Momaday in 1989. In 1990 Susan Scar-berry-Garcia’s 1986 dissertation, “Sources of Healing in House Made of Dawn” was published as Landmarks of Healing: A Study of House Made of Dawn. In 1997 Schubnell published a collection of interviews, Conversations with N. Scott Momaday.
Another indicator of the critical reception of Momaday is found in the many encyclopedias and literary histories of American literature that include chapters or entries on him. The Columbia Literary History of the United States (1988) makes passing reference to House Made of Dawn, crediting Momaday with offering “nonstereotyped approaches” to literature by “marginalized members of our society.”38 A Literary History of the American West (1987) places Momaday in an American Indian context, citing him as a forerunner of “a generation of Indian writers who seek in their own work to represent the content and style of the oral tradition.”39 In a chapter titled “American Indian Fiction, 1968-1983” in The Columbia Literary History of the United States, Paula Gunn Allen notes that since the 1960s fiction by American Indian writers has been booming, and “Momaday set off this boom.”40 An entry on Momaday in Encyclopedia of American Literature (1999) similarly states that many believe Momaday’s first novel “actually initiated the Native American literary renaissance.”41
In an overview of writings by Native Americans, A. LaVonne Brown Ruoff writes, “Momaday became the most influential American Indian writer in the late 1960s and early 1970s.” She explains that “Through his emphasis on the problems of Indians in contemporary society, on the importance of oral tradition and ritual, and on the use of memory to structure plot, Momaday provided an example that several later Indian novelists followed.”42 In a similar survey Andrew Wiget discusses Momaday’s fiction and poetry, although he makes no effort to place him in a tradition of either Indian or non-Indian literature.43
Charles R. Larson argues in American Indian Fiction (1978) that Momaday has not moved beyond his first novel. Larson claims that since House Made of Dawn, the author’s publications “have been marred by a kind of repetitive preciousness and pretentiousness, indicating that Momaday has become trapped in a literary holding pattern.”44 Clearly, Larson’s is the minority view. According to Arnold Krupat in The Voice in the Margin: Native American Literature and the Canon (1989), an overview of American Indian literature in the context of the canon, Momaday is “the presumptive ground-breaker or forefather” to whom subsequent American Indian authors are greatly indebted.45
Although scholarship on Momaday has for the most part been restricted to considering the author and his works in a Native American context, there has been some effort to study him in a wider context. As early as 1977, for example, Floyd C. Watkins included a chapter on House Made of Dawn in a study titled In Time and Place: Some Origins of American Fiction. Watkins ranks Momaday with important modernists, com-paring him with writers such as Faulkner, John Steinbeck, Margaret Mitchell, William Styron, Willa Cather, and Sinclair Lewis.46 In his investigation of Momaday’s cultural and literary background, Schubnell is careful to investigate the non-Indian influences on his work and to place him in a wider context, one that is not exclusively Native American. Similarly, Hartwig Isernhagen argues that Momaday takes a strong modernist position like that of Winters, Joyce, and Marcel Proust.47
Despite these efforts, however, Momaday has by and large remained—as far as critics and the literary canon have been concerned—the subject of study primarily as an American Indian writer. The subject matter of his works generally centers on Native Americans and the issues concerning them, but at the same time he has been fully integrated into mainstream American culture, having taught, for example, in English departments at such universities as Stanford and Berkeley. Still, it is not inappropriate that Momaday be considered preeminent among American Indian authors. He is Kiowa; he has also imagined himself to be Kiowa; he peoples his southwestern landscapes with Indian characters; and he argues vehemently for the importance of his actual and spiritual tribal relations and histories.
NOTES
1. Hartwig Isernhagen, Momaday, Vizenor, Armstrong: Conversations on American Indian Writing (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1999), p. 35.
2. Joëlle Rostkowski, “Looking Back: House Made of Dawn as the Portrait of a Lost Generation,” QWERTY 7 (1997): 147.
3. Matthias Schubnell, N. Scott Momaday: The Cultural and Literary Background (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1985), p. 96.
4. Lee Abbott, “An Interview with N. Scott Momaday,” in Conversations with N. Scott Momaday, edited by Schubnell (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1997), p. 31.
5. Rostkowski, “Looking Back,” p. 147.
6. N. Scott Momaday, The Ancient Child (New York: Doubleday, 1989), p. 55.
7. Charles L. Woodard, Ancestral Voice: Conversations with N. Scott Momaday (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989), p. 128.
8. Abbott, “An Interview with N. Scott Momaday,” pp. 35, 33.
9. Momaday, preface to In the Presence of the Sun: Stories and Poems, 1961-1991 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992), p. xvii.
10. Woodard, Ancestral Voice, p. 76.
11. Momaday, In the Presence of the Sun, p. 143.
12. Abbott, “An Interview with N. Scott Momaday,” p. 35.
13. Momaday, “The Man Made of Words,” in Indian Voices, edited by Robert Costo (San Francisco: Indian Historian Press, 1970), p. 51.
14. Abbott, “An Interview with N. Scott Momaday,” pp. 25, 24.
15. Ollie Reed Jr., “Return to Jemez,” Albuquerque Tribune, 27 November 1997, sec. B, p. 1.
16. Abbott, “An Interview with N. Scott Momaday,” p. 34.
17. Camille Adkins, “Interview with N. Scott Momaday,” in Conversations with N. Scott Momaday, p. 227.
18. Momaday, preface to In the Presence of the Sun, p. xvii.
19. Woodard, Ancestral Voice, p. 128.
20. Abbott, “An Interview with N. Scott Momaday,” pp. 25, 26.
21. Ibid., p. 25.
22. Ibid, pp. 29-30.
23. Isernhagen, Momaday, Vizeno, Armstrong, p. 56.
24. Momaday, quoted in Kenneth Lincoln, “Tai-me to Rainy Mountain: The Makings of American Indian Literature,” American Indian Quarterly, 10 (Summer 1986): 104.
25. Momaday, The Way to Rainy Mountain (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1969), p. 12.
26. Momaday, quoted in Lincoln, “Tai-me to Rainy Mountain,” p. 104.
27. Schubnell, N. Scott Momaday, p. 94.
28. Ibid, p. 95.
29. Momaday, “The Well,” Ramparts, 2, no. 1 (1963): 52.
30. Ibid.
31. Momaday, House Made of Dawn (New York: Perennial Library, 1989), p. 211.
32. Momaday, “The Well,” p. 50.
33. Martha Scott Trimble, N. Scott Momaday, Boise State College Western Writers Series, no. 9 (Boise, Idaho: Boise State College, 1973), p. 19.
34. Yvor Winters, quoted in Schubnell, N. Scott Momaday, p. 29.
35. See Momaday, House Made of Dawn, pp. 198-204.
36. See Momaday, House Made of Dawn, pp. 14-22.
37. Trimble, N. Scott Momaday, p. 19.
38. The Columbia Literary History of the United States, edited by Emory Elliott and others (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), p. 1172.
39. A Literary History of the American West, edited by Golden Taylor and others (Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 1987), pp. 23-24.
40. Paula Gunn Allen, “American Indian Fiction, 1968-1983,” in The Columbia Literary History of the United States, p. 1058.
41. Encyclopedia of American Literature, edited by Steven Serafin and others (New York: Continuum Press, 1999), p. 780.
42. A. LaVonne Brown Ruoff, American Indian Literatures: An Introduction, Bibliographic Review, and Selected Bibliography (New York: Modern Language Association, 1990), p. 76.
43. Andrew Wiget, Native American Literature (Boston: Twayne, 1985), p. 76.
44. Charles R. Larson, American Indian Fiction (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1978), pp. 167-168.
45. Arnold Krupat, The Voice in the Margin: Native American Literature and the Canon (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), p. 177.
46. Floyd C. Watkins, In Time and Place: Some Origins of American Fiction (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1977), pp. 3-15.
47. Isernhagen, “N. Scott Momaday and the Use(s) of Modernism: Some Remarks on the Example of Yvor Winters,” in Aspects of Modernism: Studies in Honor of Max Nanny, edited by Andreas Fischer, Martin Heusser, and Thomas Hermann (Tubingen, Ger-many: Narr, 1997), p. 313.
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