Ancient Child

In his first novel since the Pulitzer Prize-winning House Made of Dawn, N. Scott Momaday shapes the ancient Kiowa myth of a boy who turned into a bear into a timeless American classic. The Ancient Child juxtaposes Indian lore and Wild West legend into a hypnotic, often lyrical contemporary novel—the story of Locke Setman, known as Set, a Native American raised far from the reservation by his adoptive father. Set feels a strange aching in his soul and, returning to tribal lands for the funeral of his grandmother, is drawn irresistibly to the fabled bear-boy. When he meets Grey, a beautiful young medicine woman with a visionary gift, his world is turned upside down. Here is a magical saga of one man's tormented search for his identity—a quintessential American novel, and a great one.

In his first novel since the Pulitzer Prize-winning House Made of Dawn, N. Scott Momaday shapes the ancient Kiowa myth of a boy who turned into a bear into a timeless American classic. The Ancient Child juxtaposes Indian lore and Wild West legend into a hypnotic, often lyrical contemporary novel—the story of Locke Setman, known as Set, a Native American raised far from the reservation by his adoptive father. Set feels a strange aching in his soul and, returning to tribal lands for the funeral of his grandmother, is drawn irresistibly to the fabled bear-boy. When he meets Grey, a beautiful young medicine woman with a visionary gift, his world is turned upside down. Here is a magical saga of one man's tormented search for his identity—a quintessential American novel, and a great one.

Library Journal

Locke Setman, a highly successful Bay Area painter, fears that he has lost touch with his ``inner child'' in the process of making it big. Then, during a brief trip to Oklahoma, he meets a beautiful American Indian woman named Grey who dresses in beaded buckskin, speaks Kiowa and Navajo like one of the elders, and has elaborate visionary conversations with the ghost of Billy the Kid. Armed with a medicine bundle and a bag of peyote buttons, Grey slowly draws Setman into a magical world of ritual that both revitalizes and transforms him. Momaday prefaces this novel -- his first since the Pulitzer Prize-winning House Made of Dawn (1968) -- with a quotation from Borges: ``For myth is at the beginning of literature, and also at its end.'' Indeed, the entire work is a clever mosaic of what Levi-Strauss calls mythemes, tiny facets of meaning that inexorably draw the reader in. A fascinating and hypnotically beautiful book that belongs in every collection of Western Americana.

N. Scott Momaday is a novelist, a poet, and a painter. Among the awards he has received for writing are the Pulitzer Prize and the Premio Letterario Internazionale "Mondello." He is Regent's Professor of English at the University of Arizona, and he lives in Tucson with his wife and daughter.