ABSTRACT
I In 1969, when Kiowa author N.Scott Momaday won the Pulitzer Prize for his first novel, House Made of Dawn (1968), the world took note of the high quality of Native American writing and of the complexity of the Kiowa, Navajo, and Pueblo oral mythological traditions that terrace this contemporary fiction. Distinguished as one of the finest twentieth-century American novels, House Made of Dawn has been translated into Dutch, Italian, German, Swedish, Norwegian, and Polish, and Momaday’s The Way to Rainy Mountain (1969) into French, German, Italian, and Japanese. Yet the full long-range impact of Momaday’s literary contribution is hard to assess-not only because Momaday is still active as a writer, but also because other Indian writers, whose imaginations and opportunities unfolded as a result of his path-breaking efforts, are still dreaming of songs and stories to come.
