Longtime UA Prof. N. Scott Momaday, first Native winner of Pulitzer Prize for fiction, dead at 89

N. Scott Momaday, the much-lauded author of "House Made of Dawn" and for years a professor at the University of Arizona, has died at age 89.

Momaday was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction in 1969 for his debut novel, "House of Dawn," making him the first Native American to receive the honor.

A poet and folklorist as well as a fiction writer, Momaday died last Wednesday at his home in Santa Fe, N.M., his publisher said Monday. He had been in failing health, HarperCollins said.

"Scott was an extraordinary person and an extraordinary poet and writer. He was a singular voice in American literature, and it was an honor and a privilege to work with him," said his editor, Jennifer Civiletto. "His Kiowa heritage was deeply meaningful to him and he devoted much of his life to celebrating and preserving Native American culture, especially the oral tradition."

'And the journey is an evocation of three things in particular: a landscape that is incomparable, a time that is gone forever, and the human spirit, which endures.' — N. Scott Momaday, The Way to Rainy Mountain

Momaday, born in Oklahoma and raised on reservations in Arizona and New Mexico, studied at the University of New Mexico and Stanford University. He taught at the University of California–Santa Barbara and University of California-Berkeley before becoming a professor at the University of Arizona in 1982, teaching English and comparative literature.

Among his many published works, beyond his famed debut novel, are "The Way to Rainy Mountain" (1969), "The Names: A Memoir" (1976), "The Gourd Dancer" (1976), "The Man Made of Words: Essays, Stories, Passages" (1997) and "The Death of Sitting Bear" (2020).

Momaday's knowledge of Kiowa tribal history and folklore was featured in the Ken Burns and Stephen Ives 1996 documentary "The West."

Among his many honors, he received the first Lifetime Achievement Award from the Native Writers' Circle of the Americas in 1992, and was awarded a National Medal of Arts in 2007 by President George W. Bush "for his writings and his work that celebrate and preserve Native American art and oral tradition."

He moved to Oklahoma in 2007, and later to New Mexico.

"It was a true gift to study with Scott Momaday at UA in the '90s," said Maggie Golston, head of the English Department at Pima Community College. "I spent two semesters of Monday afternoons at Modern Languages as an undergraduate, the room filled to capacity and coursing with electricity. There were no laptops, no polling apps or PowerPoint slides. There were books and papers and pens scrawling wildly to catch that lightning in a bottle, that voice and that vision. We held our breaths."

UA officials did not release a statement recognizing Momaday's death.