Happy Birthday, N. Scott Momaday

Born February 27, 1934, Lawton, OK | Died January 24, 2024, Santa Fe, NM

Today, the Best American Essays newsletter celebrates novelist, poet, and essayist N. Scott Momaday on the 91st anniversary of his birth. As a pioneer of modern Native American literature in multiple genres, Momaday has received many honors, including the Golden Plate Award from the American Academy of Achievement, a Pulitzer Prize, a National Medal of Arts, and a position as the Oklahoma Centennial Poet Laureate.

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Conversations with N. Scott Momaday, University Press of Mississippi, 1997.

“A poem, if it succeeds, brings together the best of your intelligence, the best of your articulation, the best of your emotion. And that is the highest goal of literature.”

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House Made of Dawn, University of Arizona Press, 1996.

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“We are what we imagine. Our very existence consists in our imagination of ourselves. Our best destiny is to imagine, at least, completely, who and what, and that we are. The greatest tragedy that can befall us is to go unimagined.”

House Made of Dawn (1968), Momaday’s Pulitzer-Prize-winning novel, is considered the first major work of the Native American Renaissance. Earth Keeper: Reflections on the American Land (2020) is Momaday’s final published collection of essays. The Death of Sitting Bear (2022) is his final collection of poetry. The Man Made of Words (1998) drew critical acclaim for Momaday’s nonfiction.

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First published nonfiction work:

• The Way to Rainy Mountain, University of New Mexico Press, 1969.

Select nonfiction bibliography:

• The Man Made of Words, St. Martin’s Griffin, 1998.

• The Names: A Memoir, University of Arizona Press, 1987.

Essays by N. Scott Momaday listed in Notables (N) in The Best American Essays:

• “A Divine Blindness,” The Georgia Review, 1996 (BAE 1997, N).

• “New Mexico: Passage into Legend,” New York Times Magazine, 1992 (BAE 1993, N).

• “Sacred and Ancestral Ground,” New York Times Magazine, 1988 (BAE 1989, N).

• “Everett Ruess: The Dark Trail into Myth,” American West, 1987 (BAE 1988, N).

• “Discovering the Land of Light,” New York Times Magazine, 1985 (BAE 1986, N).

See also:

Visit this collection of short essays celebrating N. Scott Momaday for receiving the Hadada Award at The Paris Review.

Watch the documentary “N. Scott Momaday: Words from a Bear,” by PBS, 2019.

Watch or read this interview with the Academy of Achievement, 2017.

Read “Remembering the man made of words” by Joy Harjo, The Washington Post, 2024.

Read “Stories From a Legend: N. Scott Momaday” by Carmella Padilla, New Mexico Magazine, 2017.