John Neihardt

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Johnathan (John) Gneisenau Neihardt (January 8, 1881 – November 24, 1973) was an American author of poetry and prose, an amateur historian and ethnographer, and a philosopher of the Great Plains. Born at the end of the American settlement of the Plains, his attention was nevertheless drawn to the experiences and memories of those who had been a part of the European migration as well as the American Indian cultures they displaced. He travelled down the Missouri River by open boat, visited with old trappers, became familiar with a number of Indian communities, and did extensive research throughout the Plains and Rocky Mountains. He then wrote to preserve these memories from the pioneer past in books that range across a broad variety of styles, from pleasant travelogue to epic poetry to extended narration of the dreams of a shaman. In 1921 the Nebraska Legislature elected him as the state's poet laureate, a title he held for fifty-two years until his death.

[edit] Biography

Neihardt was born in Sharpsburg, Illinois; his family moved to Wayne, Nebraska when he was 10. A graduate of Nebraska Normal College in Wayne at the age of 16, he taught in rural schools near Hoskins. Neihardt had been writing poetry since the age of 12; he published his first book, The Divine Enchantment, at the age of 19. The book is based on Hindu mysticism, certainly an ambitious project for a young writer, but a forerunner of many of his perspectives and much of his later work. [1]

In 1901, Neihardt moved to Bancroft, Nebraska, on the edge of the Omaha Reservation. He worked with a local trader among the Indians, beginning a lifelong fascination with their culture. He also co-owned and edited the local newspaper, the Bancroft Blade. Sixty years later, townspeople still remembered him as an unusual character, given to long, rambling walks and flights of imagination. After a trip to the Black Hills, he published A Bundle of Myrrh, romantic poetry in free verse, which was well-received by critics. It also attracted the attention in Paris of Mona Martinsen, a young sculpture student of Auguste Rodin. She was so moved by the poetry that she began corresponding with Neihardt. One year later, she moved to Nebraska and they were married.

An open-boat excursion of the Missouri River from Fort Benton, Montana, to Sioux City, Iowa—a journey of 2,000 miles—was published as a travelogue in The River and I. The trip was also the beginning of extensive travel and research for Neihardt's large project, a cycle of five epic poems that would cover the time span from the arrival of the trapping companies on the Plains to the tragic end of the Ghost Dance movement at the 1890 Wounded Knee Massacre. The works were completed and published at various times over the next twenty-nine years, and were finally compiled as A Cycle of the West. In researching the Cycle, Neihardt interviewed many cavalrymen and Indians who had participated in the 1876 Battle of the Little Bighorn, and his depiction the battle is thus detailed and highly accurate.

In 1920, the Neihardt family moved to Branson, Missouri. In the summer of 1930, as part of his research into the American Indian perspective on the Ghost Dance movement, Neihardt contacted an Oglala holy man named Black Elk, who had been present as a young man at the Battle of the Little Big Horn and the Wounded Knee Massacre. As Neihardt tells the story, Black Elk gave him the gift of his life's narrative, including the visions he had had and some of the Oglala rituals he had performed. The two men developed a close friendship. The book Black Elk Speaks, grew from their conversations continuing in the spring of 1931, and is now Neihardt's most familiar work. Black Elk bestowed upon Neihardt the Sioux name of Flaming Rainbow, after a prominent image in Black Elk's visions. The name of Flaming Rainbow is present on modern copies of Black Elk Speaks.

Over the years, he was a professor of poetry at the University of Nebraska, a literary editor in St. Louis, Missouri, and a poet-in-residence and lecturer at the University of Missouri–Columbia. His wife Mona died from injuries in an automabile accident in 1958. His 1971 appearance for ninety minutes on the Dick Cavett Show spurred renewed interest in Black Elk. Neihardt died in 1973 in Columbia, Missouri.

Neihardt was inducted into the Nebraska Hall of Fame in 1974. The Neihardt Center is in Bancroft, Nebraska, and contains a museum, prayer garden, and a small study where he did some of his writing. Neihardt Hall is a residence hall and one of the oldest buildings on campus at the University of Nebraska and houses the university's honors program.

[edit] List of works

(Please Note: Many of the original works have been republished or are included as volumes in the collected works. The individual poems of the Cycle are listed, but the ISBNs are only given for the collections.)

[edit] External links and references