Concluding the anthology are selections from the literary criticism that helped form his philosophy of literature and the autobiographical writing of his twilight years. The extent of Neihardt's achievement is apparent long before the reader comes to the selections from the classic Black Elk Speaks and the fine, late novel When the Trees Flowered. A Cycle of the West, the five-volume masterwork written over nearly thirty years, receives its due with chapters from The Song of Three Friends, The Song of Hugh Glass, The Song of Jed Smith, The Song of the Indian Wars, and The Song of the Messiah. Included among the early lyrics are 'Let Me Live Out My Years.' The short stories that brought him his first fame are represented by 'Dreams Are Wiser Than Men' and the memorably horrific 'Alien.' An excerpt from The River and I documents a trip down the Missouri as atmospheric and eventful as any described by Mark Twain. In her introduction, Hilda Neihardt, who was with her father when he interviewed Black Elk at Pine Ridge, provides many personal details surrounding the publication of his works. The Giving Earth includes nearly forty selections representing every phase of Neihardt’s art, from the passionate poetry of his youth to the masterworks of his maturity to the lapidary reflections of his old age. Neihardt (1881–1973) wrote in almost all major fiction, lyric and epic poetry, biography, autobiography, travelogue, literary criticism, and the familiar essay. The slowly revolving Milky Way was only a glory within me the great woman-star jeweling the summit of a cliff, was only an ecstasy within me the murmuring of the river out in the dark was only the singing of my heart and the deep, deep blue of the heavens was only the splendid color of my soul.Internationally known for Black Elk Speaks and A Cycle of the West, John G. Space and eternity were I-vast projections of myself, tingling with my consciousness to the remotest fringe of the outward swinging atom-drift through immeasurable night, pierced capriciously with shafts of paradoxic day through and beyond the awful circle of yearless duration, my ego lived and knew itself and thrilled with the glory of being. And then suddenly and without shock-like the shifting of the wood smoke-the mood veered, and there was nothing but I.

And in it all, one spot of consciousness more acute than other spots and that was the something that had eaten hugely, and that now felt the inward-flung glory of it all the swooning, half-voluptuous sense of awe and wonder, the rippling, shimmering, universal joy. No now, no to-morrow, no yesterday, no I! Only eternity, one vast whole-sun-shot, star-sprent, love-filled, changeless.

“I felt the sense of time and self drop away from me.

John g neihardt books