John G. Neihardt

John Gneisenau Neihardt (January 8, 1881 – November 24, 1973) was an American writer and poet, amateur historian and ethnographer. Born at the end of the American settlement of the Plains, he became interested in the lives of those who had been a part of the European-American migration, as well as the Indigenous peoples whom they had often displaced.

His best-known work is Black Elk Speaks (1932), which Neihardt presents as an extended narration of the visions of the Lakota medicine man Black Elk. It was translated into German as Ich Rufe mein Volk (I Call My People) (1953). In the United States, the book was reprinted in 1961, at the beginning of an increase in non-Native interest in Native American cultures. Its widespread popularity has supported four other editions. In 2008 the State University of New York published the book in a premier, annotated edition.

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, which was the basis of many of his perspectives and underlay much of his later work.

In 1901, Neihardt moved to Bancroft, Nebraska, on the edge of the Omaha Reservation, beginning a lifelong fascination with Indian cultures. He also co-owned and edited the local newspaper, the Bancroft Blade. Sixty years later, townspeople remembered him as an unusual character, given to long, rambling walks and flights of imagination. After a trip to the Black Hills, Neihardt published A Bundle of Myrrh, romantic poetry in free verse.

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