Navarre Scott Momaday is a Kiowa writer and professor born in 1934. He earned a BA in English from the University of New Mexico in 1958 and a PhD in English from Stanford in 1963. His first novel, House Made of Dawn, was published in 1968 and is largely credited with inspiring the first wave of the Native American Literary Renaissance. He is a significant influence on the work of later Indigenous writers, especially the novelist and poet Leslie Marmon Silko. House Made of Dawn won the Pulitzer Prize in fiction in 1969 and brought Indigenous writing widespread recognition on the world stage. He followed this work with The Way to Rainy Mountain in 1969.

Though The Way to Rainy Mountain is dedicated to both his parents, Momaday’s Kiowa heritage is on his father Al Momaday’s side, and this is the family line reflected throughout the book. In some sense, The Way to Rainy Mountain began as an earlier project, the 1967 book, The Journey of Tai-me, which was initially published in an art edition of just 100 copies. That earlier work contained a collection of folklore that he had gathered through interviews with tribal elders regarding the Tai-me bundle.