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John Neihardt - Biography

John Neihardt - Biography: Encyclopedia II - John Neihardt - Biography

Neihardt was born in Sharpsburg, Illinois; his family moved to Wayne, Nebraska, when he was 10. A graduate of Nebraska Normal School 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 p ...

John Neihardt: Encyclopedia II - John Neihardt - Biography

John Neihardt - Biography

Neihardt was born in Sharpsburg, Illinois; his family moved to Wayne, Nebraska, when he was 10. A graduate of Nebraska Normal School 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. 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 a young sculpture student of Auguste Rodin: Mona Martinsen was so moved by the poetry that she began corresponding with the poet. 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 Wounded Knee. 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 battle at Little Big Horn, and his depiction the battle is thus detailed and highly accurate.

As part of his research into the Ghost Dance Movement from the Indians' perspective, Neihardt contacted an Oglala holy man named Black Elk, who had been present as a young man at both Little Big Horn and Wounded Knee. As Neihardt tells the story, Black Elk gave him the gift of his life's story, including the visions he had had and some of the Oglala rituals he had performed. The result appears to have been a close friendship between the two. The book, Black Elk Speaks, grew from this conversation, and is now Neihardt's most familiar book.

In 1920, the Neihardt family moved to Branson, Missouri. Over the years, he was a professor of poetry at the University of Nebraska, a literary editor in Saint 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.