SOURCE: N. Scott Momaday, Boise State College, 1973, 46 p.

Trimble is an American educator and critic. In the excerpt below, she briefly analyzes some major themes and symbols in House Made of Dawn.

Invited to submit to Harper & Row some poetry for publication, Momaday instead submitted the prose manuscript of House Made of Dawn for the Harper Prize Novel Contest, even though he had missed the deadline. Harper & Row published the book in 1968; Signet followed with a paperback edition in 1969. "Three Sketches from House Made of Dawn" had appeared in the October 1966 issue of The Southern Review, with a footnote announcing the pending publication by Harper & Row, and with a statement by the author:

The novel is about an Indian who returns from World War II and finds that he cannot recover his tribal identity; nor can he escape the cultural context in which he grew up. He is...