Momaday as a Writer
An Author's Routine
After mostly writing poetry during his four years at Stanford, Momaday returned to the novel he started while an undergraduate. During this time in Santa Barbara, Momaday stuck to a strict schedule. He woke up each day at 5 AM, drove to the nearby restaurant for coffee and crisp bacon while reading the Los Angeles Times. By 7 AM, he was back home and wrote until noon. This was one of the most productive periods of his life.
Momaday and Dickinson
In 1966, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and relocated to Amherst, Massachusetts. There he spent the following year reading Emily Dickinson's poems and comparing them with American scholar Thomas Johnson's variorum edition of her manuscripts. A highlight of Momaday's time with Dickinson's works includes holding her 19th-century Herbarium, a fragile item that now remains untouched to avoid the loss of leaf fragments from its pages.
While in Amherst, Momaday finalized House Made of Dawn. He described writing the final chapter of the novel while "looking out at the beauty of the swirling snow of a New England winter" (House Made of Dawn Preface pg. 5).
Momaday's Pulitzer Prize
Following his time at Amherst in 1968, Momaday received a call from his editor at Harper & Row informing him that he had won the Pulitzer Prize for his debut novel, House Made of Dawn.
This news came much to Momaday, as he was unaware the novel had been nominated. He learned the sixth-floor receptionist decided to apply on his behalf. He made a note to thank the receptionist the next time he was in New York.
House Made of Dawn is notably the first novel by a Native American person to win a Pulitzer, and it ignited the Native American Renaissance in literature.