In fact, Neihardt seems one of those rare persons destined from birth to be a poet; at least, his parents must have thought so. Born on 8 January 1881 in a rented two-room shack near Sharpsburg, Illinois, to Nicholas Nathan Neihardt and Alice Culler Neihardt, he was christened John Greenleaf Neihardt after the poet John Greenleaf Whittier--the middle name was later changed to Gneisenau. Nicholas deserted his family after moving them to Kansas City, Missouri, where he had found work as a cable-car conductor; John was ten at the time his father left.
Neihardt's mother was the major influence on his early years; she took him and his two older sisters to live with her parents in a sod house on the upper Solomon River in western Kansas, where Neihardt grew up on the edge of poverty, but happily, and where he acquired that love of open spaces and wide horizons that made him decide at an early age to live always and only in the West and as much as possible in the country.
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