John G. Neihardt is most widely known for his book about a Sioux holy man, Black Elk Speaks (1932), but he considered himself a poet and designated as his masterwork the five-part epic, A Cycle of the West, begun in 1913 and completed in 1941. In his ear...

Throughout his seventy-five-year career as a writer, John G. Neihardt's aspiration was to be the epic poet of the American West; he is remembered chiefly, however, for his work as an editor. His ambition was to fulfill what he became convinced at an earl...

John Neihardt's reputation rests on five historical epics begun in 1912, completed in 1941, and collected in the 656-page volume, A Cycle of the West (1949). The heroes are the white trappers who opened the Rocky Mountains to fur trading, the explorers w...

Black Elk Speaks by John Neihardt Acollaborative effort, Black Elk Speaks was the result of a series of interviews between Nick Black Elk, an American Indian from a Sioux tribe, and John Neihardt, a white poet. Black Elk, a holy man who fought in the...

Black Elk Speaks is a 1932 autobiography of an Oglala Sioux medicine man as told to John Neihardt. In the summer of 1930, as part of his research into the Native American perspective on the Ghost Dance movement, Neihardt contacted an Oglala holy man...

Brian Holloway. Interpreting the Legacy: John Neihardt and Black Elk Speaks. Boulder: UP of Colorado, 2003. xvi+ 220 pp. Interpreting the Legacy is an attractive book with many useful facsimile pages of the transcripts and manuscripts relating to Black Elk Speaks. Holloway undertakes...

Rowlands, Lucinda Indian Country Today (Lakota Times) 11-13-2002 OMAHA, Neb. - "Our history in the olden days was written on the four winds, but our elders, chiefs and wise men handed it down from generation to generation around campfires. Today is so different,...

[The essay from which this excerpt is taken was read at the annual meeting of the Western Literature Association in October 1971.] Black Elk Speaks has been many things to many people, and has been studied at various times as anthropology, as sociology, as psychology, and as history. It has been cited as evidence of a religious revival and used as an ecological handbook. But no one, as far as I know, has written about Black Elk Speaks as literature, and while its protagonist, Black Elk, has become a sort of...

[Black Elk Speaks] is told in language that suggests Indian idiom, as in Neihardt's Omaha stories. Short sentences, simple syntax and connective words, Indian expressions ("Yellow metal" for "gold"; "four-leggeds" for "horses"; "horse-backs" for "horses and riders") created the impression of Indian speech so well that some critics mistakenly assumed Neihardt had simply typed up Enid's notes verbatim, a notion t...