Books by John G. Neihardt

Coming four years after The Dawn Builder (1910), John G. Neihardt''s second novel portrays the lives of Black Hills miners and of those who preyed on them. Life''s Lure takes up a theme that runs throughout Neihardt''s work: the consequences of an inordinate desire for wealth. The protagonists come in sets of three. On one hand there are Samuel Drake, a hapless thirty-year-old who has just squandered his inheritance in a Deadwood card game; his fickle wife Joy; and Louis Devlin, a smooth-talking, fast-fingered gentleman gambler. Devlin is not above talking about philosophy; he even paraphrases Nietzsche. On the other hand are Monte Joe, a drunken scoundrel, Punkins, a young man fresh off the farm, guileless and easy pickings; and Nellie, a mining-camp prostitute. Women and gold lure men to go on living, but Fortune is "a capricious jilt." Neihardt puts a lot of colorful characters in motion and then, along with the reader, watches them collide.

Originally published just months after his marriage to Mona Martinsen, the poems collected in Man-Song celebrate passionate love and offer many personal glimpses of the young John Neihardt. Unashamedly erotic, they reveal his capacity for love at age twenty-eight. Poems like "A Vision of Woman" and "Women-Wine" show the lover''s prejudices and greedy need for caresses and strong embraces. Those like "To Volney Streamer" are addressed to male friends and anticipate the theme of male bonding that runs throughout his work. Because passion takes various forms, Man-Song also include lyrics of the warrior little like the war chants Neihardt later learned from Plains Indians. "Battle Cry," a poem that was recited by Clarence Darrow and Samuel Gompers, is an example of the fighting songs current in the European avant-garde preceding World War I. Neihardt was beginning his struggle to reconcile the demands of the robustly physical life with spiritual insight. His love poems for the American West were still to come, but in Man-Song he is already exploring the vast tract between the essentially erotic and the divine that would be cultivated in his later work. This edition is the first complete reprinting of the work since 1909.

The Dawn Builder, originally published in 1910, was John G. NeihardtΓÇÖs first novel. At the center of it is a one-eyed, peg-legged man named Waters. He comes to Fort Calhoun, Nebraska Territory, in 1862 and drinks himself into a hole when he isnΓÇÖt setting type on the town newspaper. Because his thirst is metaphysical as well, he only temporarily loses sight of the possibility of happiness, of building his own dawn. Like all memorable characters, Waters canΓÇÖt be contained on the page. Isolated by his physical ugliness, marked by loneliness not yet deadened by silence, compromised by his own excessive energy, he reaches out to a young woman farther outside society than he is and to a kindly widow and her son. The Dawn Builder is reminiscent of Twain in its frontier humor, of Poe in its bizarre adventures, and of Dickens in its casting of some busybodies who belong to the Needle Club. Its return to print will be welcomed by John G. NeihardtΓÇÖs many admirers.

The creative energy that would in time produce A Cycle of the West and Black Elk Speaks is apparent in his first book, The Divine Enchantment, published in 1990 when he was nineteen years old. It can be viewed as an early version of the philosophy of spiritual awareness that Neihardt articulated twenty-five years later in Poetic Values. They are reprinted together for the first time in this Landmark Edition. A narrative poem bursting with youthful enthusiasm, The Divine Enchantment reveals Neihardt not as an ordinary poet but as a visionary bard. Inspired by his reading of Eastern philosophy, it is a Hindu myth with Christian parallels. The virgin heroine, Devanaguy, fulfills prophecy in bearing Krishna, the incarnation of Vishnu, in spite of imprisonment by a jealous and fearful king. NeihardtΓÇÖs vision of the union of spirit and matter, of reason and higher consciousness, introduces themes he was to expand on in his later writings.Poetic Values, a series of lectures published in 1925, speaks of the common need for self-enlightenment. Drawing on sources ranging from the Upanishads to psychology textbooks, Neihardt argues that poetry can provide a balanced philosophy to live by in bridging the gap between Western materialism and Eastern otherworldliness. Poetry links the objective with the subjective, the real with the imaginary, and for the reader of Poetic Values, as for the heroine of The Divine Enchantment, the highest self-enlightenment comes with self-forgetfulness. Blair Whitney writes that, in comparing these two works, ΓÇ£one can see [NeihardtΓÇÖs] strong, consistent development from a boy who loved words and had big dreams to a mature poet who found ways to realize his ideals and to communicate them to a large audience of readers.ΓÇ¥

Featured in magazines between 1905 and 1908, the nine stories in this work present vulnerable fur-traders and Indians, demi-devils and almost-angels. These stories include "Feather for Feather," "A Political Coup at Little Omaha," "The Brutal Fact," "The Epic-Minded Scot," "The Discarded Fetish," and "The Ancient Memory".

Owing much to young the author's intimate association with the Omahas at their reservation in eastern Nebraska, the stories were of an Indian cast that perplexed the critics. This title contains nine stories appeared from 1901 to 1905 in the Overland Monthly; five were collected in The Lonesome Trail in 1907.

Internationally known for "Black Elk Speaks" and "A Cycle of the West", John G Neihardt (1881-1973) wrote in almost all major genres. This work includes nearly forty selections representing almost every phase of Neihardt's art, from the passionate poetry of his youth to the masterworks of his maturity to the lapidary reflections of his old age.

Presents the story of the Oglala Lakota visionary and healer Nicholas Black Elk (1863-1950) and his people during momentous twilight years of the nineteenth century. It offers readers much more than a precious glimpse of a vanished time. Black Elk's searing visions of the unity of humanity and Earth, conveyed by John G. Neihardt, have made this book a classic that crosses multiple genres.

How important were Sioux authors such as Charles Eastman in the opinion of the writer responsible for Black Elk Speaks? What will be the legacy of modern poetry according to the poet behind The Cycle of the West? This volume offers a glimpse into the social and literary thought of John G. Neihardt.

Written by the author who in 1908 along with two companions traveled the Missouri River in a twenty-foot canoe, beginning at the headwaters in Montana and ending up at Sioux City, Iowa, this book describes their adventures on that wild waterway before it was dammed by the Army Corps of Engineers, and points out storied sites along the shore.

Before his poem "A Cycle of the West", John G Neihardt wrote many short stories that found favor with readers and critics. This work offers a collection of tales including "The Look in the Face", one of many about a social outcast; "The White Wakunda", about a Christ figure; and, "Vylin" and "Mignon", moral fables about Indian-white marriages.

John Neihardt, celebrated for his cycle of epic poems about the American West and for Black Elk Speaks, was in his nineties when he wrote this engaging book about growing up in the Midwest. This work describes the people and events instrumental in shaping his later distinguished career as a poet; historian, and authority on Indians.

Deals with the tragic defeat of the Plains Indians. This work includes "The Song of the Indian Wars" (1925) and "The Song of the Messiah" (1935).

Features a narrative that begins in 1822, when Smith ascended the Missouri River in the first fur-trading expedition of William H. Ashley and Andrew Henry, and ends in 1831, when he was killed by Comanche Indians on the Cimarron River. This work follows the history-making adventures of Smith and his companions.