"A Writers Style" - N. Scott Momaday Review
A Writers Style The Pulitzer Prize winning writer N. Scott Momaday has become known as a very distinctive writer who depicts the stories of the Native American life in almost poetic ways. He does an excellent job of transporting the reader from the black and white pages of a book, to a world where every detail is pointed out and every emotion felt when reading one of Momaday's books or other writings. This style of writing that Momaday uses is very evident in his work "The Way to Rainy Mountain," and made even more apparent by reading a review of the book House Made of Dawn found on a web site run by HarperCollins Publishers. Throughout the essay "The Way to Rainy Mountain", Momaday uses very descriptive words, which brings the places he is describing to life in the minds eye. The essay begins with his description of the homelands of his Kiowa people, which has been given the name of Rainy Mountain. The picture painted in the readers mind by these beautiful descriptions makes it easily understandable why the Kiowa people came to settle upon this land as their home. For example, part of the description Momaday gives of the land within the first paragraph is, "There are green belts along the rivers and creeks, linear groves of hickory and pecan, willow and witch hazel. At a distance in July or August the streaming foliage seems almost to writhe in fire." (Momaday, 95) I can not help but imagine the trees wavering in a gentle early fall breeze as the yellows and reds seem as if the whole land is burning beneath the fading summer sun. Halfway through the essay he describes the Black Hills by saying "A dark mist lay over the Black Hills and the land was like iron." (97) He then describes Devil's Tower in the next sentence by writing "
I caught sight of Devil's Tower upthrust against the gray sky as if in the birth of time the core of the earth had broken through its crust and the motion of the world was begun." (97) The way that Momaday describes these breathtaking
Cited: Momaday, N. Scott. "The Way to Rainy Mountain." Fields of Reading. Ed. Nancy Comley, et al. New York: St. Martin 's Press, 1998. 577-580. Perennial Classics. Ed. HarperCollins Publisher. 26 February 2002