The American writer Navarre Scott Momaday, the first native American author to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction with the novel «House Made of Dawn», has died on Wednesday 24th January in Santa Fe, New Mexico, at the age of 89. The announcement of his passing was made by his publisher HarperCollins.
In 1969, N. Scott Momaday (as he signed) rose to international fame by winning the Pulitzer with «House Made of Dawn», a broad novel that tells the dramatic return to the native pueblo of the Indian Abel, a veteran of the Second World War. Thanks to this book - which masterfully conveys the sense of the protagonist's suffering consciousness, suspended between two very different worlds - the writer inaugurated the new season of Native American literature.
Born in Anandarko (Oklahoma) on 24 February 1934, belonging to the Kiowa tribe, raised in Indian reservations between New Mexico and Arizona, in close contact with the Navaho, Kiowa, Apache and Pueblo communities, Scott Momaday has placed this world at the center of his narrative. In Italian, the novels «The Journey to Rainy Mountain» and «The Names»; the collection of stories «The Strange and True Story of My Life with Billy the Kid (and other stories)»; and the essay «Guardian of the Earth. Reflections on the American landscape» have been published. After teaching at various American universities, Scott Momaday joined the Kiowa fraternity of the Gourd Dance. Since 1980 he has taught English and comparative literature at the University of Arizona in Tucson. He was a consultant from 1970 of the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities, receiving in 2018 the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for his career. In 2021 he was awarded the Robert Frost Medal, an award reserved for the best American poets. He has received numerous honors such as a National Medal of Arts, a Hadada Award and the title of Unesco Artist for Peace.