House Made of Dawn: A Novel

Written by N. Scott Momaday

Narrated by N. Scott Momaday and Darrell Dennis

“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 read 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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Caedmon
• Release date: Mar 10, 2020
• ISBN: 9780062995353

N. Scott Momaday

N. Scott Momaday (1934-2024) is an internationally renowned poet, Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, artist, teacher, and storyteller. He authored numerous works that include poetry, novels, essays, plays, and children’s stories. He won the Pulitzer Prize for his debut novel House Made of Dawn and was the recipient of numerous awards and honors, including the Academy of American Poets Prize, the National Medal of Arts, the Ken Burns American Heritage Prize, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize Foundation's Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award, and the Frost Medal for distinguished lifetime achievement in poetry. A longtime professor of English and American literature, Momaday earned his PhD from Stanford University and retired as Regents Professor at the University of Arizona. In 2022, he was inducted into the inducted into the Academy of American Arts and Letters. 

Reviews for House Made of Dawn

[ari santa · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Beautiful and deep. But the narrator is reading too fast and does not have a voice that resonates with the spirit of the text. What a pity.

[castlelass · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

“There was a house made of dawn. It was made of pollen and of rain, and the land was very old and everlasting. There were many colors on the hills, and the plain was bright with different-colored clays and sands. Red and blue and spotted horses grazed in the plain, and there was a dark wilderness on the mountains beyond. The land was still and strong. It was beautiful all around.”

As the story opens, protagonist Abel, a young Native American, has recently returned to New Mexico after serving in WWII. He lives with his grandfather, develops a relationship with a woman, interacts with the local priest, and commits a crime. Years later, he is living in Los Angeles with a friend. He experiences drug-induced hallucinations and drinks heavily. He attends Native American ceremonies. He is beaten and left for dead. In the country or city, he has trouble assimilating.

The storyline is fragmented and told in non-linear fashion. It is one of those books where I appreciate the literary merit, but it held little appeal for me. It toggles back and forth between the current experiences, flashbacks, and stories of Native American ceremonies. I was not always sure when events were supposed to be taking place. The writing is descriptive. The concept is creative. However, I found it disjointed and never felt truly engaged.

[m.belljackson · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Despite the enthralling poetic beauty of the descriptions of nature, the horrifying animal cruelty destroyed the narrativeand left me not caring about the fate of the characters who seem to accept this as part of Tradition.

[angelalam-300700 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

I struggled reading this book although it won a Pulitzer Prize.

The book was structured by days over a period of time and told from different viewpoints in either third or first person with sections in italics for flashbacks in time. After reading so much contemporary literature with straight forward narratives and high concept plots, this book was more like taking a walk through an untended orchard rather than strolling through a public park. Highly recommended for those with the ability to concentrate through distractions and who prefer a more rambling open space narrative with room to explore concepts rather than plot points.

[drfuriosa · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

An image-driven novel about the pain that comes with remembrance. Not narrative-driven, but it contains some interesting poetry and some beautiful descriptions. Worth a read for sure.

[eas7788 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

It's hard to critique this because it was such a groundbreaking work. Parts of it are beautiful but other parts are unnecessarily fuzzy -- the pov, style-wise, seems very much of its period. Fails in depictions of women, sadly. But the most important parts, presenting a Native American story, creating a complex Native American character with agency and change and uniqueness, are excellent.

[maowangvater · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Abel, like many young veterans of the Second World War has trouble readjusting to life back home on the Jemez Pueblo in New Mexico. Feeling threatened by a tall albino Abel kills the man thinking him a witch about to turn himself into a snake and attack. The court is not convinced by Abel’s plea of self-defense, and he goes to prison. After he is released, he is relocated to San Francisco. There he has a friendly social worker. He finds a group of indigenous friends for support. He gets a new job in a factory. But his sense of alienation, cultural dissonance, peyote, alcohol, and crime take their toll.Momaday's tale of an American Indian veteran’s tragic post-traumatic stress and the sharp dissonance between traditional life in the natural beauty of New Mexico and mid-twentieth century urban life in the city is told in several voices: Abel’s grandfather, a priest on the reservation, his friends, briefly by a fellow member of his combat unit, and poetically by the author in his descriptions of the action and scenery of the tale. This is a book filled with awe.

[quondame · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This is a book that must be read deliberately, and seems as if over half the pages were ripped from a larger tome and only about a quarter of what was removed was returned in a collage of patches through the remainder. There is poetry and pain and dislocation. The war traumatized young man is by no means the only sandblasted soul to inhabit these patched pages.

[mhaley_2 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Just garbage enough to win a Pulitzer Prize.

[jgrwriter · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

House made of Dawn is filled with vivid imagery. This novel is not meant to "tell" a story, but rather "show" it. I believe Momaday honors the oral tradition of storytelling, with leaps and turns and fading in and fading out between scenes. Perhaps I am unfamiliar with the Native American lifestyle, I only know that this book spoke to me. I ran with Abel from the very beginning, right through to the end.

[isomdm · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

No plot just random thoughts of a drunken indian.

[yabookfest · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

House Made of Dawn was a landmark book when written in 1966, offering insight into the experiences of Native Americans in the mid-20th century. It is the story of Abel, who grows up in a tiny village on the Kiowa reservation in the southwest, where life is ruled by ancient traditions and the natural rhythms of the land. When he enters the military during World War II, this natural order is shattered and Abel struggles to find himself, no longer at ease at home but unable to function in the modern, Anglo world. The writing style and structure of the novel is unusual. Some of the events in the novel are based on Momaday’s personal experiences and actual incidents that took place in Jemez Pueblo, New Mexico. It frequently draws on traditional Native American storytelling and myth, with themes of death and rebirth. The detailed, poetic, sensory descriptions of the land draw the reader into the Native American experience of harmony with nature. In that sense, it is very much like the opening of Steinbeck’s The Pearl. Reportedly, it began as a series of poems, grew into a series of short stories, and was finally shaped into a novel, a process that results in a somewhat fragmented structure. This combination of techniques can pose challenges for the reader.Momaday was the first Native American to be awarded a Pulitzer Prize when House Made of Dawn won the honor in 1969. The book would certainly be considered a foundation piece for any Native American studies program and would add a unique perspective to a course on modern American fiction.

[debnance_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Abel returns to the reservationafter serving in World War II,but has trouble adapting tohis life there. Very depressing.I was most amazed with the waythis author brought me into hisworld through the use of sensorydetails.

[sean191 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This is the second book I've read written by Momaday. It's also the last I'll read. I just don't like his writing style. Towards the end of the book it took on a different style, less convoluted, less confusing, but it was too little too late.

[terpsichoreus · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Momaday's now-famous book has more social and political importance than literary. Like the genre it ushered in, it may have been positive for the writer in general, but often relied upon a cliche racist/anti-racist dichotomy played through vague and often meaningless metaphor.The author's busy mind has made a complex work, but not one with any central point or in-depth exploration. The 1970s New Age movement was a combination of many different world philosophies, attempting to find some common ground for humanity that might soften the Hegemonic West. Unfortunately, without a rhetorical basis, this movement provided us with mere watered-down generalism.It is now a popular personal philosophy because it is so vague that it can be used to support any concept and ideal. Momaday falls into this same trap with his erratic and varied text, which started out as a poetic series.This all ended in Momaday's premature Pulitzer, and he's sat steadfastly on that laurel ever since, and given us no more reason to presume he deserved it. The prize committee was clearly interested in following civil rights with a politically correct investment in 'diversity'. The only problem is that Momaday's work is as fundamentally colonized as Kipling's.His presentation of 'native' themes and storytelling methods is a fairly thin veil over what is not as much a Native American novel as just an American novel. The Native culture Momaday represented was already overwritten by the dominant western culture.Though Momaday tried to inject some cultural understanding and 'oral traditions' into his book, in the end it is little more than a descendant of Faulkner's. Not a badly written one, but neither is it focused enough to represent some cultural 'changing of the guard'.

[schmerguls · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

1097 House Made of Dawn, by N. Scott Momaday (read 27 Nov 1970) (Pulitzer Fiction prize in 1969) This is a novel by an Indian about an Indian who leaves the reservation, disintegrates, and then returns to it. It is full of writing that sounds like "Creative Writing" and has some true-sounding stuff in it. But on balance, I like writing which is a little clearer as to what is going on.

[meditationesmartini · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

There's a certain kind of Verfremdung or ostraenie or whatever that people tend to bust out when they're trying to give you a peek into the alien mind of the utter Other, the Other that is being presented as different in kind, whether it's the "literal" alien from outer space, or the exoticized racial alien, or what have you. You see it in comic books a lot, and science fiction. Some of its hallmarks appear to be:

-only using declarative sentences;

-lack of access to the subject's thoughts, or more usually, presentation of his thoughts in a profoundly estranging way;

-paying hyperattention to sensory and chemical responses on the part of the alien subject - all the lights are brighter, the wind cuts, the smells are strange, and the subject feels amorphous fear - whether it's the alien-in-the-familiar like a Predator popping up in New York, or the alien-in-the-alien - like in this book, with Abel the Kiowa out in the mesas - it's not whether it's alien to the subject that matters, but to the reader, and it makes him considerably less than a protagonist really.

So that offended me some at first and seemed a bit Uncle-Tommy on Momaday's part at first, to say nothing of annoying, and exactly the sort of pseudo-sympathetic book about natives that would have won a Pulitzer in 1969, but then I proceeded and there were delights! The amazing description of the hawks hunting and then doing a blood dance on the bodies of their prey, and the talk about us whiteys and how we're enervating, killing ourselves with words. Cool.

And finally you see Abel's story take shape in the words of others and the emotional hollowness left behind in his women and the strangeness left behind by his contact with others, and you can see it as psychodrama, or the dull sad downfall of a drunken Indian, or the translation to philistines, on the Pulitzer committee and beyond, of a great soul. The incredible multipage monologue that fills most of the last half of the book has an epic arc and inevitability, giving Abel his bard - "The Ballad of Abel the Hunter." And you realize the reason he doesn't get to be his own protagonist is because that would be cleaning up the crimes of history. We - whites, settlers - made him into this ludicrous creature. But Momaday rescues him, ennobles him, and in the powerful final passage, frees him to assume his centrality, lets Abel hunt. And he is magnificent.

[ijustgetbored · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

A book I will never, ever understand.