Biography
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, a forerunner of many of his perspectives and much of his later work.
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, 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, which was well received by critics.
Read more about this topic: John Neihardt
Famous quotes containing the word biography:
“Just how difficult it is to write biography can be reckoned by anybody who sits down and considers just how many people know the real truth about his or her love affairs.”
—Rebecca West (1892–1983)
“The best part of a writer’s biography is not the record of his adventures but the story of his style.”
—Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)
“In how few words, for instance, the Greeks would have told the story of Abelard and Heloise, making but a sentence of our classical dictionary.... We moderns, on the other hand, collect only the raw materials of biography and history, “memoirs to serve for a history,” which is but materials to serve for a mythology.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)