The Way to Rainy Mountain Author:N. Scott Momaday First published in paperback by UNM Press in 1976, The Way to Rainy Mountain has sold over 200,000 copies. This re-designed edition includes a new Preface. — The paperback edition of The Way to Rainy Mountain was first published twenty-five years ago. One should not be surprised, I suppose, that it has remained vital, and immediate, for tha... more »t is the nature of story. And this is particularly true of the oral tradition, which exists in a dimension of timelessness. I was first told these stories by my father when I was a child. I do not know how long they had existed before I heard them. They seem to proceed from a place of origin as old as the earth.
The stories in The Way to Rainy Mountain are told in three voices. The first voice is the voice of my father, the ancestral voice, and the voice of the Kiowa oral tradition. The second is the voice of historical commentary. And the third is that of personal reminiscence, my own voice. There is a turning and returning of myth, history, and memoir throughout, a narrative wheel that is as sacred as language itself.from the new Preface
Written with great dignity, the book has something about it of the timeless, of that long view down which the Kiowa look to their myth-shrouded beginnings.New York Times
I know nothing quite like this book, and nothing of the Indian that is at once so authentic and so moving.Wallace Stegner« less
The three pronged analysis of his journey via short facts, legend, and his own experience combine in a powerful way. A very quick read but a powerful one.
N. Scott Momaday, winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1969, is of Kiowa ancestry and tells the story of his people through their own legends and stories and through his recollections of his boyhood. Very beautifully written!