Neihardt's 1920 biography of Jedediah Smith (an earlier American explorer who was the first to cross the Sierra Nevada), The Splendid Wayfaring, provided material for The Song of Jed Smith, published in 1941. It was published separately as a first-person adventure or travelogue, but it also supplied a great deal of the background material for The Song of Hugh Glass (1915) and The Song of Three Friends (1919), which were the first two sections of A Cycle of the West. For example, Outing magazine commissioned The River and I. During these years, he developed the pattern of doing other kinds of writing to earn money and sometimes to acquire material, then allowing himself an extended period of time to work on his poetry. Certainly, as a poet he was a minor figure compared with such young modernists as Robert Frost, for example, whose first collection of poetry was published in 1914.įrom 1913 to 1941, Neihardt concentrated his artistic energies on writing A Cycle of the West, an epic poem about the American West composed of five separate songs. Some may argue that his location in the Midwest placed him outside the most significant literary community of his day, and that his art suffered from the lack of influence and support. In the end, however, the quality of his early poetry was limited: It was highly romantic and even sentimental, the language often ornate and decorative. His early poetry was received respectfully the influential editor Harriet Monroe even compared him to the radical American modernist poet, Ezra Pound. He wrote for Midwestern papers and for the New York Times (literary reviews). An account of a 2000-mile canoe trip on the Missouri River, published in serial form in 19, was published as The River and I in 1910. He also wrote numerous short stories, some of which were collected in The Lonesome Trail (1907), two novels - The Dawn-Builder (1911) and Life's Lure (1914) - and four closet dramas (plays intended to be read rather than performed), two of which were later published as Two Mothers (1921). Some of the poems in these volumes were collected as The Quest and published in 1916. In these early years, Neihardt published three more volumes of poetry: A Bundle of Myrrh (1907), Man-Song (1909), and The Stranger at the Gate (1912). They were married for 50 years, until Mona died in 1958, and had four children. She came to know Neihardt through his published poetry, and they conducted their courtship by mail, marrying the day after they met in person. In 1908, Neihardt married Mona Martinsen, a sculptor who had trained with Rodin in Paris. Around this time, Neihardt lived with his mother in Nebraska near an Omaha reservation, which probably provided his first acquaintance with American Indians. Neither was successful, but both are early indications of Neihardt's fascination with spirituality and cultures outside the European-American mainstream. In 1900, he published The Divine Enchantment, a book-length poem about Hindu deities, and in 1904, another long poem, The Wind God's Wooing, about a Greek fisherman turned into a god. He graduated in 1897 at the age of sixteen and immediately began writing poetry, determined to live his vocation as a poet. He excelled to a degree beyond that of his classmates, and enrolled in a special classics program. Neihardt entered Nebraska Normal School (now Nebraska State Teachers' College) at the age of twelve, working as the college bell-ringer to pay his way. His father, often unemployed, abandoned the family when John was about ten, and his mother moved with her son to Kansas and then Nebraska to live near her parents. (Neihardt later changed his middle name to Gneisenau in honor of a German military officer who helped defeat Napoleon.) John showed early signs of being a precocious child, and at the age of eleven during an illness, he had a mystical experience that convinced him of his vocation as a poet. His father named him John Greenleaf after the popular American poet John Greenleaf Whittier. Neihardt was born in Sharpsburg, Illinois, to impoverished parents who passed their interest in reading and the creative life on to him, but found it difficult to make a living in the American Midwest.
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