![]() Students campuswide soon relished their encounters with the Hobbit-like bard in browline frames, an epic written in his wrinkles, in the way he carried himself, small but mighty, like the amateur boxer he once was, so many years ago. The lectures were based on his life’s work, a series of five “songs” or “heroic narrative poems” called A Cycle of the West, written at a pace of roughly three lines a day between the ages of 31 and 60, “designed,” he wrote, “to celebrate the great mood of courage that was developed west of the Missouri River in the nineteenth century.” With the last song several years behind him now, and the Macmillan Company promising to publish the cycle in full, Neihardt turned “with great enthusiasm” (and a long wooden pointer) toward that which he had once considered the “backwaters” of creativity: academia. Neihardt - barely 5 feet tall with a shock of buoyant white hair and a blue serge suit - perched himself casually on the edge of his desk at Mizzou and began performing a course he called Epic America. In the spring of 1949, a diminutive man named John G. This dirt-street scholar, a lover of wide open spaces and the audacity it took to master them, could with equal aplomb navigate the Missouri River, commune with a cousin of Crazy Horse and make literature to immortalize it all. In the 1960s, well into his ninth decade, the national spotlight shone on Neihardt when his Black Elk Speaks struck a cultural chord and became a spiritual guide to a new generation. When John Neihardt joined MU’s faculty 70 years ago, this charismatic poet not only beguiled legions of students with his epic tales of the frontier but also helped forge the voices of talented young authors, including William Least Heat-Moon, who went on to write the bestseller Blue Highways. Maps, original illustrations by Standing Bear, and a set of appendixes rounds out the edition.Photos courtesy the State Historical Society of Missouri Neihardt provide background on this landmark work along with pieces by Vine Deloria Jr., Raymond J. Deloria and annotations of Black Elk’s story by renowned Lakota scholar Raymond J. ![]() ![]() This complete edition features a new introduction by historian Philip J. Neihardt understood and conveyed Black Elk’s experiences in this powerful and inspirational message for all humankind. Neihardt in 1930 on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota and asked Neihardt to share his story with the world. Whether appreciated as the poignant tale of a Lakota life, as a history of a Native nation, or as an enduring spiritual testament, Black Elk Speaks is unforgettable.īlack Elk met the distinguished poet, writer, and critic John G. Neihardt, have made this book a classic that crosses multiple genres. Black Elk’s searing visions of the unity of humanity and Earth, conveyed by John G. ![]() “An American classic.”- Western Historical Quarterlyīlack Elk Speaks, 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, offers readers much more than a precious glimpse of a vanished time.
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