Recommendations
Books Like House Made of Dawn
Best books to read after House Made of Dawn by N. Scott Momaday
If House Made of Dawn moved you — Abel's broken return from the war, his failure in the relocation program's Los Angeles, the way Momaday holds the Pueblo ceremonial world and the American urban world as mutually incomprehensible — these eight books share its portrait of Native Americans between worlds, its formal ambition, or its engagement with what is lost when indigenous communities lose their ceremonial connection to their land.
- 1Buy
Ceremony
by Leslie Marmon Silko
Tayo, a Laguna veteran, healing through traditional ceremony — Silko's debut is the direct companion to House Made of Dawn: both are foundational texts of the Native American literary renaissance, both follow a half-Native veteran who returns from the Second World War shattered and must find his way back to the ceremonial world that can heal him; Silko's novel is less formally experimental than Momaday's and more explicit about the healing ceremonies themselves
- 2Buy
Love Medicine
by Louise Erdrich
Two Ojibwe families on a North Dakota reservation — Erdrich's debut is the next major work in the Native American literary renaissance that House Made of Dawn launched; the same investment in indigenous community life, the same engagement with the damage that assimilation and dispossession have done to Native families, and the same insistence that Native literature deserves the same formal ambition and literary attention as any other tradition
- 3Buy
The Way to Rainy Mountain
by N. Scott Momaday
Momaday's lyric meditation on the Kiowa people's migration from the headwaters of the Yellowstone River to the southern Plains — the companion work to House Made of Dawn; while not a novel, it is the most direct expression of the Kiowa cultural and spiritual world that underlies the Pueblo world of the novel, and it shows Momaday's formal range beyond realistic fiction into lyric prose, oral history, and visual art
- 4Buy
Winter in the Blood
by James Welch
An unnamed Blackfeet narrator drifting in Montana — Welch's 1974 debut is the most direct companion to House Made of Dawn in its portrait of a young Native man who has lost his connection to his people's ceremonial world and cannot find his way back; where Momaday's Abel is destroyed by violence and the relocation program, Welch's narrator is destroyed by a more gradual drift into alcoholism and alienation
- 5Buy
The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian
by Sherman Alexie
Junior Spirit leaving the Spokane reservation for an all-white high school — Alexie's award-winning novel shares House Made of Dawn's portrait of a Native person caught between worlds, unable to fully belong to either the reservation community or the white world; where Momaday's Abel is destroyed by his inability to belong, Alexie's Junior finds a comic path through the same dilemma; recommended for readers who want the same themes in a more accessible, contemporary mode
- 6Buy
There There
by Tommy Orange
Twelve urban Native Americans converging on the Big Oakland Powwow — Orange's debut is the urban Native American companion to House Made of Dawn's reservation and relocation portrait; where Abel is destroyed by the Los Angeles relocation program of the 1950s, Orange's characters are urban Natives in contemporary Oakland who are trying to reconstruct Native identity in the city that replaced the reservation for many of their families' generations
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Beloved
by Toni Morrison
Sethe and the ghost of her murdered daughter in post-Civil War Ohio — Morrison's masterpiece shares House Made of Dawn's formal ambition and its engagement with the psychological consequences of extreme historical violence; both novels use the conventions of realism as a frame for events that exceed realism — the ghost in Beloved, the supernatural elements in Momaday — and both are organized around the question of whether healing from historical violence is possible and what form it takes
- 8Buy
The Things They Carried
by Tim O'Brien
O'Brien's stories about Vietnam — the non-Native companion to House Made of Dawn in its portrait of what the Second World War and the Vietnam War do to the men who fight them; where Abel cannot reintegrate into the Pueblo community after the war, O'Brien's characters cannot reintegrate into American civilian life; both works are organized around the insight that war produces a damage to the self that ordinary civilian institutions are not equipped to repair
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