Volume 4, Number 5 - Fall 1971


Dr. John F. Neihardt

From "Over The Ozark Trails"
By Pearl Sputiock

With Dr. John G. Neihardt so much in the news and in the hearts of all the mid-west we quote from "Over the Ozark Trails" by Pearl Spurlock.(Ed.)

"As we are entering Branson from the west, let us pause for a short time and hear more about our distinguished and wonderful friends, for we are surely proud to call the Neihardt family our friends, and we are still more proud that their permanent home is now with us. John G. Neihardt is America’s Greatest Epic Poet.

"In 1921 the State of Nebraska, his home for many years, distinguished, him by legislative enactment with the title ‘Poet Laureate of Nebraska and the Prairies,’ which honor has been supplemented by his appointment as honorary Professor of Poetry at the University of Nebraska, and the conferring of the degree of Doctor of Letters. Since 1926, Mr. Neihardt has been Literary Editor of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. For years he has been writing the "Epic Cycle of the West," of which the finished parts are being used in schools all over the United States. Mr. Neihardt has just published in the series of the Cycle of the West, "The Song of the Messiah."

"Mrs. Mona Martinsen Neihardt, Mr. Neihardt’s gracious and charming wife, studied sculpture under Rodin in Paris and exhibited her work at the Paris Salon in 1906. At the back of the Neihardt home, we see a beautiful flower garden and a fountain figure which, is a composite of the Neihardt babies, and is painted in life colors. Mrs. Neihardt presented a bust portrait of her husband to the State Teachers College at Wayne, Nebraska, and is now putting out a novelty of the Ozarks which is to be a series of babies, of which the first two are completed. Mrs. Neihardt has also recently completed a bust of Dr. R.M. Good, President of the School of the Ozarks at Point Lookout, Missouri."

Mrs. Spurlock’s book was published in 1936 or 1937.

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