John G. Neihardt

How important were Sioux authors such as Charles Eastman in the opinion of the writer responsible for Black Elk Speaks? What will be the legacy of modern poetry according to the poet behind The Cycle of the West? Knowledge and Opinion offers an unparalleled glimpse into the social and literary thought of John G. Neihardt (1881-1973), one of America's most celebrated poets and authors. A wealth of little-known essays and reviews deepen and round out our appreciation for the accomplishments of Neihardt by revealing his no-nonsense opinions about noted literary figures and trends, events, and social issues of his day.

Featured in these pages are Neihardt's views of such literary giants as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Robert Frost, H. G. Wells, E. E. Cummings, Dorothy Parker, Ernest Hemingway, Ezra Pound, Eugene O'Neill, and Upton Sinclair. The contributions of Sigmund Freud, anthropologist Paul Radin, and modern philosophers like Bertrand Russell do not escape his sweeping gaze. In their entirety, these essays showcase Neihardt's perspectives and opinions on a wide range of subjects and issues, including modern poetry, the qualities of great literature, twentieth-century trends in writing and literary criticism, the defining characteristics of Western civilization, the literatures and cultures of Native Americans, the lost world of the Old West, economic turmoil in the Great Depression, and the enduring power of classical thought.

This rich archive of essays and reviews will surprise, delight, and provoke those who thought they already knew John G. Neihardt.

This work explores the "authority" of autobiography in several related senses: first, the idea that autobiography is authoritative writing because it is presumably verifiable; second, the idea that one's life is one's exclusive textual domain; third, the idea that, because of the apparent congruence between the implicit ideology of the genre and that of the nation, autobiography has a special prestige in America. Aware of the recent critiques of the notion of autobiography as issuing from, determined by, or referring to a pre-existing self, Couser examines the ways in which the authority of particular texts is called into question--for example, because they involve pseudonymity (Mark Twain), the revision of a presumably spontaneous form (Mary Chesnut's Civil War "diaries"), bilingual authorship (Richard Rodriguez and Maxine Hong Kingston), collaborative production (Black Elk), or outright fraud (Clifford Irving's "autobiography" of Howard Hughes). Couser examines both the way in which canonical autobiographers may playfully and purposely undermine their own narrative authority and the way in which minority writers' control of their lives may be compromised. Autobiography, then, is portrayed here as an arena in which individuals struggle for self-possession and self-expression against the constraints of language, genre, and society.

John Carlos Rowe, considered one of the most eminent and progressive critics of American literature, has in recent years become instrumental in shaping the path of American studies. His latest book examines literary responses to U.S. imperialism from the late eighteenth century to the 1940s. Interpreting texts by Charles Brockden Brown, Poe, Melville, John Rollin Ridge, Twain, Henry Adams, Stephen Crane, W. E. B. Du Bois, John Neihardt, Nick Black Elk, and Zora Neale Hurston, Rowe argues that U.S. literature has a long tradition of responding critically or contributing to our imperialist ventures. Following in the critical footsteps of Richard Slotkin and Edward Said, Literary Culture and U.S. Imperialism is particularly innovative in taking account of the public and cultural response to imperialism. In this sense it could not be more relevant to what is happening in the scholarship, and should be vital reading for scholars and students of American literature and culture.