N. Scott Momaday

Momaday's parents, both teachers, moved the family among reservation schools in the Southwest, and he grew up immersed not only in Kiowa tradition through his father's side but also in the Navajo and Jemez Pueblo communities where they worked, learning several Native languages and traditions at once. He studied under the poet-critic Yvor Winters at Stanford, earning a doctorate before turning fully to fiction.

House Made of Dawn, his debut novel, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1969 and is widely credited with launching what critics later called the Native American Renaissance in literature, opening space for a generation of Indigenous novelists. The Way to Rainy Mountain, blending Kiowa myth, history, and personal memoir into a single hybrid text, extended that project outside conventional fiction.

He was also a serious visual artist and received the National Medal of Arts; he died in 2024.