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 early years he wrote a long mystic poem, The Divine Enchantment (1900), and three volumes of lyrics-- A Bundle of Myrrh (1907), Man-Song (1909), and The Stranger at the Gate (1912)--that received enthusiastic reviews. In the same period he produced numerous short stories about the West, later collected in two volumes, The Lonesome Trail (1907), and Indian Tales and Others (1926). From 1912 to 1920 Neihardt edited a literary page for the Minneapolis Journal, and later, after a period of intensive work on the epic, served as literary editor for the Saint Louis Post-Dispatch from 1926 to 1938. To the body of critical writing in the newspaper reviews he added a book on...