SOURCE: "The Art and Importance of N. Scott Momaday," in The Southern Review, Louisiana State University, Vol. XIV, No. 1, January, 1978, pp. 30-45.

In the excerpt below, Dickinson-Brown offers a stylistic examination of House Made of Dawn, The Way to Rainy Mountain and several of the poems in Angle of Geese.

The Kiowa Indian N. Scott Momaday came to public attention in 1969, surprising everyone, including himself and his editors, by winning the Pulitzer Prize for his novel House Made of Dawn. He has before and since maintained a quiet reputation in American Indian affairs and among distinguished literati for his genius, his extraordinary range, his fusion of alien cultures, and his extraordinary experiments in different literary forms.

House Made of Dawn is a memorable failure. Some of its passages attain a prose surface brilliance and also a depth, not at all like the historic depth of Macaulay or the...