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  • N. Scott Momaday: Remembering Ancestors, Earth, and Traditions: An Annotated Bio-Bibliography
  • Larry Evers
N. Scott Momaday: Remembering Ancestors, Earth, and Traditions: An Annotated Bio-Bibliography. By Phyllis Morgan. Introduction by Kenneth Lincoln. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2010. 400 pages, $60.00.

Phyllis Morgan has created an indispensible scholarly resource for all who are drawn to the work of N. Scott Momaday. Her book is also a fitting tribute to Momaday, whose restless creative energy has found outlets in a wide variety of art forms since his first published work, a poem titled "Earth and I Gave You Turquoise," appeared in the New Mexico Quarterly in 1959. Over the last fifty years, he has continued to publish poetry, but also essays, scholarly editions, travel writing, collections from oral tradition, children's books, autobiography, novels, journalism, plays, watercolors, lithographs, and other work that defies generic categorization—an example is his masterpiece, The Way to Rainy Mountain (1969), a work that invents a literary and artistic form that we had not seen before. All of this is listed in Morgan's book, along with all the varied writing about it. Momaday continues to produce, to publish, and to paint, and there is every indication that his artistic achievement will continue to grow. Remembering Ancestors, Earth, and Traditions is a labor of love, a welcome marker of Momaday's enormous achievement and his continuing importance to readers everywhere. In a passage from this book, Morgan states: "N. Scott Momaday's legacy reaches far beyond regional and national boundaries. His works, in all their many forms, and his other endeavors have had, and will continue to have, universal significance. His voice is for all peoples, all places, and all times" (56).

This annotated bio-bibliography is organized in three parts: a biography and chronology, a bibliography of works by Momaday, and a bibliography of responses to him and his work. Morgan's "A Life in a Rich and Exotic World: A Biography of N. Scott Momaday" is concise, well-ordered, and readable. It is filled with telling anecdotes culled from dozens of interviews as well as from Morgan's own talks with Momaday and her experiences in many of the settings for his work. We have had for some time the very full and useful literary biography written by Matthias Schubnell, N. Scott Momaday: The Cultural and Literary Background (1985), and Charles Woodward's sympathetic and inventive book of conversations with Momaday, Ancestral Voice (1989). Appropriate to its function of introducing the bibliographies that are central to her project, Morgan's biography is less ambitious than either of these, yet her work gives an [End Page 430] admirably concentrated biographical narrative that brings us into the twenty-first century. Throughout, she is able to highlight Momaday's voracious appetite for knowledge and experience and travel. She even turns up sources that I have not seen cited elsewhere, such as an item from the Lincoln Sunday Journal-Star (1986) by a writer who studied with Momaday at Stanford under Ivor Winters. A very full and useful year-to-year chronology of major events in Momaday's life, complete with a comprehensive listing of his many awards and prizes and accomplishments (some seventeen honorary degrees and counting), is an especially useful feature.

Part 2, the listing of Momaday's own writings and publications, is far and away the most comprehensive I have seen. It provides annotations to clarify the relations of various versions and is arranged in an unusually large number of sub-categories. Thus, we have "A Chronological Listing of First Editions and First Printings," followed by "Books and Private Printings," which provides very detailed annotations on each published book. These annotations include a listing of all reprints and translations. Momaday's Pulitizer Prize-winning novel, House Made of Dawn, originally published in 1968, has, for example, been reprinted nine times and translated into Finnish, French, German, Italian, Norwegian, Polish, Danish, Russian, and Turkish. But the annotations in many cases go far beyond reprints, editions, and translations to offer substantive analysis and clarifying detail. An example is Morgan's comparison of the Kiowa stories Momaday includes in The Journey of Tai-me...

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