One of the most important public poets in the United States during the twentieth century, John G. Neihardt saw in the history of the Great Plains, Rockies, and Intermountain West the raw material for epic verse, a “heroic age” with an ethos comparable to that which produced tales of Achilles, Siegfried, and Beowulf. Accordingly, he made his life work the composition of a series of long narrative poems recounting the stories of European American trappers and traders as well as those of some of the Natives of the region. The result was five epics, stylistically influenced by Tennyson’s Idylls of the King, which Neihardt gathered under the general title Cycle of the West. Incidental to the preparation of one of the epics, Song of the Messiah (referencing the Ghost Dance prophet Wovoka), Neihardt interviewed Nicholas Black Elk, an Oglala Lakota elder. The immediate product of his contact with Black Elk was the work with which Neihardt’s name is now most usually associated. Black Elk Speaks remains a principal text in the representation of American Indians more than eighty years after its publication in 1932 and is probably the main reason that folklorists will be interested in the subject of this well-researched and well-written biography.

Timothy G. Anderson offers the best available survey of Neihardt’s life. The future poet was born in Illinois in 1881 and spent parts of his childhood in Kansas and Missouri before settling in Wayne, Nebraska. The influences on his turn to poet—the result of a visionary experience during a childhood illness—came largely from his reading major figures in nineteenth-century poetry, particularly Tennyson. Neihardt, who rejected modernism for a Victorian-laced romanticism, began his writing career by producing effusive lyrics filled with formal poetic diction and classical allusions. His first publications, though, drew upon the Native Americana with which he is now most usually associated. Several rewritten versions of Omaha oral narratives, which he had encountered on the reservation near his Nebraska home, appeared in national periodicals such as the Overland Monthly as early as 1901. Neihardt continued to write fiction throughout his life, but poetry was his vocation. His verses, almost all composed in rhymed iambic pentameter instead of the free verse used by many of his contemporaries and which he despised, began to be published in periodicals. His earliest book-length collections of short poems appeared during the first decade of the twentieth century, and the first of his epics, The Song of Hugh Glass, came out in 1915. He devoted himself to other epic treatments of western historical events and personalities for a score of subsequent years and brought together five long narrative poems, previously published separately, in The Cycle of the West in 1949. Meanwhile, he was continuing to write lyric poetry, producing literary columns for several midwestern newspapers, publishing fiction and nonfiction prose, and touring the country to present readings of his work. Though Poet Laureate of Nebraska, he took a faculty position at the University of Missouri in the early 1950s and became a popular lecturer and campus personality. Never taken as seriously as contemporaries such as Ezra Pound by the literary critical establishment, Neihardt remained a spokesperson for a somewhat old-fashioned poetic consciousness throughout his life. Due to the renewed interest in Black Elk Speaks occasioned by the era’s search for alternative solutions to social and metaphysical questions, he enjoyed a resurgence of popularity in the 1960s which endured until his death in 1973.

Anderson tells Neihardt’s story effectively and engagingly. He melds a journalist’s ear for language with a scholar’s attention to reliably sourced detail. Folklorists will need to read this volume if they want fully to understand the dynamic that produced Neihardt’s most enduring book. Anderson devotes three chapters more or less to Black Elk Speaks: an account of the “pilgrimage” to the Pine Ridge Reservation in 1931 which produced several weeks’ worth of interviews between Neihardt and the Lakota elder, who at the time was about seventy years old; a treatment of the process that produced the book and its immediate reception; and narration of the book’s (and Neihardt’s) re-emergence some thirty years after its original appearance. These chapters provide the context for understanding what Neihardt was thinking as he prepared the book for publication and for its reception. Fully understanding his motivations, though, requires knowledge of his own experiences dating from much earlier in his life, especially the vision that turned him to poetry--comparable, according to Neihardt, to Black Elk’s life-changing visions during his childhood. The poet believed that he and Black Elk were fellow mystics. Moreover, Neihardt’s conflicting views in support and, in fact, glorification of Manifest Destiny and sympathy with Native spirituality informed his life’s work and must be taken into account in considering Black Elk Speaks.

Of course, biographer Anderson should not be expected to explore some of the issues regarding the traditional knowledge that informs Black Elk’s testimony nor those involved in its presentation by Neihardt that will particularly interest folklorists. These concerns lie beyond his purpose, and they have been effectively treated in important books by Clyde Holler, Julian Rice, and Michael Steltenkamp. Anderson acknowledges the crucial work done by Raymond DeMallie, particularly in distinguishing the parts of Black Elk Speaks that come from the Native consultant from additions made by Neihardt himself. However, by placing the book in the context of Neihardt’s career, Anderson makes a significant contribution to our understanding of this important document in the history of American Indian studies, a volume which continues to shape the image (perhaps a stereotype) of First Nations people in North America.

But Anderson’s book does more than that. It is, after all, a biography of an important person of letters who figured prominently in American intellectual life throughout the first two thirds of the twentieth century. While readers with particular concern with Black Elk Speaks should definitely add this volume to their list of sources on that subject, those who have a more general interest in what was going on in American poetry during Neihardt’s long life will want to consult it as well. Even though much of his poetry seems somewhat dated, many readers will perhaps be led to try some his narrative verse from reading Anderson’s engaging account of the fulfilled life of John G. Neihardt.

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[Review length: 1044 words • Review posted on June 22, 2017]