House Made of Dawn is a 1968 novel by N. Scott Momaday, widely credited as leading the way for the breakthrough of Native American literature into the mainstream.
Like the novel's protagonist, Abel, Momaday lived both inside and outside of mainstream society, growing up on reservations and later attending school and teaching at major universities.
[4] House Made of Dawn begins with the protagonist, Abel, returning to his reservation in New Mexico after fighting in World War II.
After arriving in the village, Abel attains a job through Father Olguin chopping wood for Angela St. John, a rich white woman who is visiting the area to bathe in the mineral waters.
His turmoil becomes clearer when he is beaten in a game of horsemanship by a local albino Indian named Juan Reyes, described as "the white man".
The leader of the group, Reverend John Big Bluff Tosamah, Priest of the Sun, teases Abel as a "longhair" who is unable to assimilate to the demands of the modern world.
However, Abel befriends a man named Ben Benally from a reservation in New Mexico and develops an intimate relationship with Milly, a kind, blonde social worker.
However, his overall situation has not improved and Abel ends up drunk on the beach with his hands, head, and upper body beaten and broken.
A downward spiral begins and Abel continues to get drunk every day, borrow money from Ben and Milly, and laze around the apartment.
House Made of Dawn produced no extensive commentary when it was first published—perhaps, as William James Smith mused in a review of the work in Commonwealth LXXXVIII (20 September 1968), because "it seems slightly un-American to criticize an American Indian's novel"—and its subject matter and theme did not seem to conform to the prescription above.
Baine Kerr has elaborated this point to suggest that Momaday has used "the modern Anglo novel [as] a vehicle for a sacred text", that in it he is "attempting to transliterate Indian culture, myth, and sensibility into an alien art form, without loss".
Other critics said it was nothing but "an interesting variation of the old alienation theme"; "a social statement rather than ... a substantial artistic achievement"; "a memorable failure"; "a reflection, not a novel in the comprehensive sense of the word" with "awkward dialogue and affected description"; "a batch of dazzling fragments".
They found it "a story of considerable power and beauty", "strong in imaginative imagery", creating a "world of wonder and exhilarating vastness".
Critic Kenneth Lincoln identified the Pulitzer for House Made of Dawn as the moment that sparked the Native American Renaissance.
Many major American Indian novelists (e.g. Paula Gunn Allen, Leslie Marmon Silko, Gerald Vizenor, James Welch, Sherman Alexie and Louise Erdrich) have cited the novel as a significant inspiration for their own work.
Originally published by Harper & Row, editions have subsequently been brought out by HarperCollins, the Penguin Group, Econo-Clad Books and the University of Arizona Press.