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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 early age was his destiny, poetic greatness; but the autobiography he edited, Black Elk Speaks: Being the Life Story of a Holy Man of the Oglala Sioux (1932), has far eclipsed Neihardt's epics. It has been described as a masterpiece "of the literature on Indians, the standard by which other efforts to tell the Indian story are judged" by Vine Deloria Jr. in his introduction to A Sender of Words: Essays in Memory of John G. Neihardt (1984) and has been called "the first American Bible" by Frederick Manfred in his essay in the same volume. Peter Iverson, in another essay from A Sender of Words, has credited Neihardt and the Commissioner of Indian Affairs John Collier with being the two people in the twentieth century "most influential in shaping a new conception of the American Indian."
If it were not for Black Elk Speaks, Neihardt's original poetry would undoubtedly receive much more attention than it does.
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