The Nebraska Sandhills: A new Heritage Room Display

A new Heritage Room display surveys the literary presence of the Nebraska Sandhills. Some of the most memorable work by Nebraska authors has emerged from this fragile and challenging landscape. Our new display includes memoirs and works of history, biography, natural history, fiction, and photography.

The visual star of this display are the very striking black and white photographs from Charles Guildner’s portfolio “Lives of Tradition.” Guildner’s work was purchased in 2007 by Lincoln City Libraries with funds privately donated for that express purpose. The silver prints depict life on the Haythorn Ranch, a storied Sandhills ranch where the owners have continued to find a profit in using horses to do jobs that were mechanized almost everywhere else.

Paul Johnsgard’s This Fragile Land: A Natural History of the Nebraska Sandhills (1995) provides a superb introduction to the ecology of the region, its geological history, its creatures and its conservation issues. Charles McIntosh, The Nebraska Sand Hills: The Human Landscape (1996) draws from a lifetime of study in presenting a complete scholarly historical geography of the region, its occupants and their conflicts, beginning with Native Americans. Superb sketch maps illustrate McIntosh’s discussions of different waves of occupation, settlement, conflict and economic development. Nellie Snyder Yost’s The Call of the Range (1966), her history of the Nebraska cattle industry, is still an excellent guide to the origins and history of the great Sandhills ranches and the cattlemen who built them.

But above all, the history of the Sandhills is the story of great characters. The history of the Sandhills lives in the memoirs, autobiographies, and biographies of those who settled the area. Their histories are one of the grand themes of Nebraska literature.

Mari Sandoz’s great biography of her father, the irascible, violent, but indomitable “Old Jules” Sandoz would be the best known of the biographies. And Sandoz, settler, land-promoter, friend of the older generation of mountain men, wanderers and Indians, feuded incessantly with his neighbors, among them Bartlett Richards, the founder of The Old Spade Ranch, in its time, the largest and most famous of the great Sandhills ranches. The biography of Richards by his son, Bartlett Richards, jr. and Ruth Van Ackern reminds us that Richards, too, was an interesting and complex character.

The Sandhills are cattle country, the region was poorly suited to the small homesteads that settlers moving in from the East imagined they might establish there. The resulting conflicts over fencing, leasing of public lands, water rights, and land use by settlers and cattlemen could turn violent. And with every policy change, ranchers seemed to come out on top over the long haul, besting the homesteaders, and acquiring their land. The ranchers were portrayed as real villains in the Eastern press, because in the East, no one really understood the futility of the broken dreams that died in the dry lands beyond the 100^th meridian. Whether or not the story that Theodore Roosevelt told Bartlett Richards to his face that he would put Richards in a Federal Penitentiary is apocryphal, Richards died in the custody of the Adams County Jail, where he was being held on a Federal conviction for fraudulent land filings. But local lore remembers that in the Kinkaid era, settlers would often gather up in such numbers at the Old Spade Ranch for the noon meal that an additional table had to be put up for the cowhands. Richards felt obliged to feed such guests, and sometimes to loan them equipment, to keep them from starving on their homesteads. The landscape itself swallowed the dreams of the farmers, only the ranchers survived.

To the biographies of Sandoz and Richards, and Lawrence Bixby, the “Preserver of the Old Spade Ranch,” in the crisis of the 1920s, one might add the memoirs of James H. Cook (1857-1942), Fifty Years on the Old Frontier (published in 1923), friend of Red Cloud and of the Northern Cheyenne and founder of the old 04 Ranch, and of his son Harold Cook, Tales of the 04 Ranch, which recounts the (fossil rich) Nebraska boyhood of the famous paleontologist. Perhaps we should remember the outlaw Doc Middleton as well. There are many more genuinely fascinating memoirs and biographies from the Sandhills than can be mentioned here.

The Sandhills are featured in many mavellous photography books. A complete collection of these would overfill the display case: Margaret MacKichan and Bob Ross, In the Kingdom of Grass (1992), Michael Forsberg’s Great Plains: America’s Lingering Wild (2009), David A. Owen, Like No Other Place: The Sandhills of Nebraska, Photographs and Stories (2010), Roger Bruhn (Foreword by Ted Kooser), Dreams in Dry Places (1990), Georg Joutras, Along the Edge of Daylight: Photographic Travels from Nebraska and the Great Plains(2005) would be among them. Michael Forsberg was a recent Ames Reader, and Lisa Norman’s Haythorn Land & Cattle Co.: A Horseman’s Heritage: A Pictorial Essay was also mentioned in an earlier post. I have used some of their covers to illustrate this posting.

The Heritage Room maintains a Nebraska Sandhills Book List on its home page.

2011 Nebraska Poet's Calendar will be introduced by Sarah Fairchild at Sunday, January 16th Ames Reading

Sarah Fairchild grew up in Norfolk, Nebraska, and studied English at Doane College and the University of Nebraska. Her Poetry has appeared in many publications, including Plainsongs. Sarah runs Black Star Press, which is once again publishing a Nebraska Poet's Calendar. At our Sunday, January 16th Ames Reading, Sarah and her friends, poets John Johnson, Mary K. Stillwell and Rex Walton will present an exiting program of poetry to celebrate the publication of the Calendar.

The original artwork used in the 2011 Nebraska Poets Calendar is being shown in displays at the entrance to Bennett Martin Public Library and on the library's second floor. Artists Connie Backus-Yoder, Sally Cox, Su Harvey, Sue Kouma Johnson, Tom Meyers, Max Miller, Marilyn Reynolds, Gene Roncka, Donna Schimonitz, Melissa L. R. Sinner, and Richard Terrell contributed to the Calendar and the displays.

The program begins at 2:00 PM Sunday, January 16, 2011 in the Heritage Room on the 3rd floor of Bennett Martin Public Library in downtown Lincoln. Come see the displays and join us for a stimulating reading and discussion.

One Book-One Lincoln Display at Bennett Martin Library

A new display on the second floor of Bennett Martin Public Library in downtown Lincoln celebrates the announcement that Joe Starita’s book, I am a Man: Chief Standing Bear’s Journey for Justice will be this year’s One Book/One Lincoln selection. Other finalists were worthy, but Starita’s book offers a riveting story with deep roots in local and regional history.

Joe Starita was born in Lincoln and studied English and Journalism at the University of Nebraska. He went on to become an investigative reporter at the Miami Herald and that newspaper’s New York City Bureau Chief. He is a former City Editor of the Lincoln Journal Star. He has been a Pulitzer Prize finalist for reporting at the Miami Herald, and his book, The Dull Knifes of Pine Ridge (1995) won him critical acclaim, local and regional awards, and a second Pulitzer Prize nomination. Starita teaches in the College of Journalism and Mass Communications at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

Starita’s books are a distinguished contribution to a strong Nebraska literary tradition. Some of the earliest serious attempts to record and understand Native American experiences and to put the Plains Indians back into American history as real people were made by Nebraska writers. Our display represents a little more than a century of Nebraskans writing about the Plains Indians.

In the best of these works, writers struggled to present the true voices of Native Americans and record their side of history in stories that seemed about to be lost to old age and death, or overlooked in a strong tendency to convert American history into a dull monument to virtue and Manifest Destiny. Real history, interesting history, is meaningful conflict, complex people who deserve to be understood on their own terms, mixed motives and light and shadow. While recognizing that the simple moralization of history is a trap that leaves us ignorant, from time to time, Nebraska writers have gently suggested that much is to be learned from the struggles of native people that sheds light on some of America’s more persistent problems at home and abroad.

The display includes work by Starita, Eli S. Ricker, Mari Sandoz, John Neihardt, Melvin Gilmore, Amos Bad Heart Bull (introduction by Mari Sandoz), George Hyde, Donald Danker, Thomas Henry Tibbles, Hartley Burr Alexander, Alan Boye, John Wunder, and Stew Magnuson, among others.

A Book Artist’s Vision: Rosekrans Hoffman--A New Display in the Heritage Room

Ruth Rosekrans Hoffman recalled for friends how her father, Jim, had

“shunned the finality of a paved road, as though Lewis and Clark had hired [him] to scout the uncharted territory of Denton. Instead, he preferred a steep mud hill in his Model A, for it put up a fight and they wrestled until he was on top. And in the 1930s the top was close to the sky.”

Her father also avoided “roads that were numbered like prisoners,” preferring to drive anonymous roads “met by farmer’s driveways, staked by mailboxes and crossed by animals.”


Photograph with, left to right, Rudolfo Gonzales, Marian Anderson, Ruth Rosekrans Hoffman, and Bob Hoffman. Ruth met Bob at a jazz concert. Photo by famed jazz photographer Jack Bradley, used here by kind permission of Jack Bradley. Bradley recalls that "both Ruth and Bob were dear friends." All rights reserved, reproduction by written permission only, Jack Bradley, 24 Skipper's Drive, Harwich, MA 02645.


Rosekrans Hoffman took her father’s independence and his love of byways to heart. Cosmopolitan as she became, after leaving Nebraska to pursue her artistic career in New York, when she found her artistic path pointing back along the roads of her childhood, she followed it. At first, she had painted, very successfully, in the style of the day. Her abstract impressionist paintings were shown at the Whitney Museum and in other famed collections. She changed direction in the 1970s as she began to illustrate children's books. Soon an agent suggested she write such a book herself. Anna Banana (New York: Borzoi Books, Alfred A. Knopf, 1975) settled Rosekrans Hoffman in a unique and successful career as an artist who wrote children’s books and provided artwork for children’s books by many other writers. She was always careful to say that she was an artist and not an illustrator. To her, this meant that the integrity of her artistic vision came first.

When she spoke to friends and interviewers, it was always apparent that Rosekrans Hoffman had unusually intense memories of her own childhood. She remembered the fine red dust that blew up from Oklahoma in the early 1930s, coming in through unsealed windows so thickly that was hard to breath indoors, so that her mother would put wet towels over Ruth and her brother’s heads to filter the air. The fortitude, ingenuity, and teamwork required for a family to survive the Great Depression years seemed to draw families and neighbors together. For a child, all unaware of her parents’ worries, those years could make for wonderful, and unusually intense (by contrast with the experience of later, more materialistic generations) childhood memories.

But all was not wonder. In the later summer of 1933, age of seven, Ruth developed a bone infection, osteomyelitis, treatable in those days before antibiotics only with painful bone drains. Most people with the disease died, Ruth spent 18 months in a full-body cast, armpits to toes, to immobilize her for the drains. She would spend many more months in partial casts, a wheelchair, and homemade braces that her father invented to enable her to become more mobile. The experience, she told Lincoln Star reporter Patty Beutler,

“gave me a new perspective on life… in bed in the body cast, horizontal I saw things I wouldn’t ordinarily see. I wasn’t a child looking up, but more like a part of the land. From my prone position, I used to eye my food like an explorer surveying the horizon. Piles of mashed potatoes took on the proportions of mountains against the skyline. Undersides of chins, nostrils, palms jumped out at me. I studied expressions, the details of wallpaper, and tiny hairs peeking out of people’s ears.”

She had been drawing since she was three or four years old, but in her long confinement in bed, she began to draw all the time. She began by copying the comic strip, “Tillie the Toiler,’ and others from the newspaper. “Good things can happen from really bad things, although you may not know it at the time,” she told a Connecticut interviewer. Her illness put her on the path to becoming an artist. She would go on to get a fine arts degree from the University of Nebraska.

As Ted Kooser recalled at her memorial, Ruth Rosekrans Hoffman “was in pain from the time she was a young girl to the day she died.” “How is it possible,” Kooser asked, “for a person enduring such suffering to create drawings and paintings so luminous with delight, to write stories with such joy and hope?” She seemed to draw on “an immense store of character” running counter to the self-centeredness that seems so widespread in our world. Kooser again:
“You all know how marvelously witty Ruth was, and how much she loved to laugh. At the end of her years, having lost her delightful and beloved husband, Bob, having lost the ability to care for herself, she could even find life in a nursing home amusing. I would go up there to visit her in part to hear what she had to say about the other people there. I would rather hear Ruth describe somebody down the hall or in the dining room than to see them myself…. She could snatch funny lines right out the air, like butterflies.”

Ruth never spent much time looking at other artists' and authors' childrens books. When she illustrated books for other writers, she favored the publishers’ usual practice of keeping the author and the artist separate until the book launch party. Her art drew on her own vision of reality, “if there is one thing I concentrate on,” she told an interviewer, “it’s expression—it never seems to lie… there is a facial expression and then there is the whole body as expression…“ Children, she noticed, “learn expression before words.” She never had children of her own, but seemed to draw from a deep well of her own childhood, on the muted colors of small town Nebraska in the 1930s, and on the quirky and independent spirit that sustained rural people in those years of trial.

The new display in the Heritage Room on the third floor of Bennett Martin Public Library includes selections from the original artwork (all in the Heritage Room) for Go To Bed: A Book of Bedtime Poems, Selected by Lee Bennett Hopkins, Illustrated by Rosekrans Hoffman. (New York: Alfred A Knopf, 1979), following through the various stages of book art production through to the color proofs. The display also includes other books, sketches and cards sent to friends, and, as part of our permanent display, two of her dolls. The display draws on the Heritage Room's files of Rosekrans Hoffman's correspondence and on artwork she donated to the Heritage Room. From the 1970s on, Rosekrans Hoffman donated posters and drawings to the Heritage Room for our fund-raising purposes.

--Stephen Cloyd

* * * *

Sources:

Rosekrans Hoffman on her father, remarks made July 28, 1983 at a celebration of the artist's work in the State Capitol Rotunda, Rosekrans Hoffman Manuscript in Heritage Room (corrected and signed by the author), "Hoffman, Rosekrans, Capitol Celebration 7-23-83."

Patty Beutler, “Rosekrans Hoffman, Native Nebraskan Draws on ‘Peculiar’ Perspective,” in Nebraska Library Association Quarterly, Vol. 12, No. 4 pp. 15-19. Beutler interviewed the author and artist about her unusual perspective and observed the connections between her childhood and her artwork noted here, especially regarding her choice of palette.

The most extensive published sketch of Rosekrans Hoffman (the name she used professionally) is Sue Williams, “Ruth Rosekrans Hoffman, A Renowned Lancaster County Artist,” in Tales and Trails Newsletter from Denton, NE and surrounding areas, Vol. 3, No. 3, June 2001, pp. 1-5.

Quotations from Ted Kooser are from “Remarks for Ruth Rosekrans Hoffman’s memorial service, December 2, 2007.” (Kooser MS in Ruth Rosekrans Hoffman vertical file, Heritage Room).

“I concentrate… on expression,” in Nora Fitzgerald, “Child’s World,” Connecticut Magazine, Vol. 52, No. 12, December, 1989, p. 115.

Small Presses and Little Magazines in Nebraska--A New Heritage Room Display

Small presses and little magazines are lively participants in Nebraska literary life. These publishing efforts treasure independent judgment, fidelity to self-chosen ideals, the discipline of craftsmanship, and the desire--perhaps most intensely felt by poets--to create something wholly one's own. Small presses value freedom from commercial, corporate, and academic influence. Writers and publishers feel that literary ideals and craft can grow and prosper best in a small face-to-face community, where frankness and immediacy survive. Over many years, the activities of these presses have helped shape a genuine community of writers in the state. Everything in our display was published in Nebraska.

Books by these Presses/Publishers will cycle through the display:
Windflower Press (Garland), Backwaters Press (Omaha) , Morpho Press (Omaha), Cummington Press (Omaha), Black Oak Press (Lincoln), Sandhills Press (Ord), Lyra Press (Lincoln), The Prairie/Plains Resource Institute, The Center for Rural Affairs, and Spring Creek Prairie Audubon Center.


Windflower Press
It is not surprising to find that Ted Kooser wrote the article on "Small Presses" in the Encyclopedia of the Great Plains. Kooser himself founded and operated the Windflower Press, which specialized in contemporary poetry. Windflower was a one-man operation. Kooser was its editor, publisher, and sometimes its book designer and illustrator. The Press gained international recognition for bringing new poetry to a wider audience and for promoting the work of younger poets. Windflower published Kooser's literary magazines, The Salt Creek Reader (1967-1971), The New Salt Creek Reader (1972-1975), and The Blue Hotel (1980-1981). The Salt Creek Reader received grant support from the National Endowment for the Arts. The Windflower Home Almanac of Poetry was recognized as one of the best books from small presses for 1980 by Library Journal. Other Windflower anthologies have received regional and international acclaim. In 1999, Kooser published Roy Scheele's Keeping the Horses as a fundraising project for the Nebraska Literary Heritage Association. Kooser's Windflower Press is now inactive (though the name is being used by an unrelated California Press).



Abbatoir Editions:
Harry Duncan, (1917-1997) was one of the leading figures in the revival of printing by hand. In 1982 Newsweek Magazine called him "the father of the post-World War II private-press movement." He began printing by hand in 1939, and over the years he would print Robert Lowell's first volume of poetry and many other works of contemporary literature. Duncan came to Nebraska in 1972 to operate a press at the University of Omaha, for which he created the Abbatoir Editions imprint. Duncan's Doors of Perception: Essays in Book Typography, W. Thomas Taylor, 1987, is a meditation on his years of experience in book design and printing. Duncan received the Jane Geske Award from The Nebraska Center for the Book in 1994.



Independent Presses
Several of Nebraska's independent presses have been founded by poets. Ted Kooser founded the Windflower Press, Greg Kosmicki founded and runs Backwaters Press, Matt Mason created Morpho Press, and Greg Kuzma founded the Best Cellar Press. David McCleery runs A Slow Tempo Press. Poets commonly self-publish their own chapbooks, so it is a small step from that to publishing other work. Matt Mason told Omaha Reader interviewer Jasmine Maharisi that "the advantage [of having your own press] is being able to do things you like and think are good rather than what will make you a lot of money... My press has never made a dime of profit."

Among the most active independent presses at the moment is Backwaters Press, where Greg Kosmicki has been assisted by volunteer editors, including poet Marge Saiser and writer Lisa Sandlin. Backwaters Press publishes on average some 15 poetry books a year. Backwaters has received numerous Nebraska Book Awards for its success in finding and publishing work by unique and talented writers from Nebraska and from around the Midwest.

Other independent publishers of note are County Historical Societies, The Center for Rural Affairs, The Prairie Plains Resource Institute. Like the poets' efforts, these reflect the will of a small community of people to see something of special value find an audience, even though the effort might not be financially profitable.

Special hard to find items included in the display:

William S. Whitney and Jan Whitney, Microcosm of the Platte. A guide to Bader Memorial Park Natural Area. Aurora: Prairie/Plains Resource Institute, 1987.
This guide to Bader Park is a small masterpiece of graphic design and single color illustration rich in ecological observations about the Platte river and Bader Park.

Weldon Kees, The Ceremony and other stories. edited with an introduction by Dana Gioia. Omaha: Abbatoir Editons, 1983.

Ted Kooser, A Book of Things. Joseph M. Ruffo, illustrator. Lincoln: Lyra Press, 1995 Limited Edition.
A very elegant slip-cased limited edition of Kooser's poems.

Matt Mason, Coffee and Astronomy and other poems. Omaha: Morpho Press, 2001

James Magorian, The Hideout of the Sigmund Freud Gang. Lincoln: Black Oak Press, 1987.

Wright Morris Display Celebrates 2010 One Book One Nebraska Selection

Wright Morris (right) signing his books in the Heritage Room.

A new Heritage Room display on the second floor of Bennett Martin Public Library in downtown Lincoln celebrates author Wright Morris. Morris gained critical acclaim as a novelist and as a photographer. He received a National Book Award twice, in 1957 for The Field of Vision , looking at how a visit to a Mexican bullfight alters the lives of a group of Nebraska tourists, and in 1981 for Plains Song.

Photography and fiction were equally important in Morris' extraordinary life-long effort to capture the soul of the Midwest. In 1942 and again in 1946 Morris won a Guggenheim fellowship to support his photographic projects. The support enabled him to return to Nebraska and to produce his first two photo-texts, The Inhabitants, and The Home Place. These ground-breaking works, combining photography and fiction, have been recognized as an attempt to create an entirely new literary form. In honor of the 100th Anniversary of Wright Morris's birth, the Nebraska Center for the Book has chosen The Home Place as the One Book, One Nebraska book for 2010. The Lone Tree Literary Society in Morris's birthplace, Central City Nebraska, will host many of this year's One Book One Nebraska activities.

Our display (snapshot above) includes signed Wright Morris posters, books and other memorabilia. Heritage Room archival collections include the Wright Morris-Victor Musselman correspondence and several original Morris prints. Wright Morris developed a close friendship with Loren Eiseley when when both men lived in the same building in Philadelphia in the late 1940s. Gale Christianson's interviews and correspondence with Morris are in our Gale Christianson Collection of Eiseley Research Materials

Artwork, book illustration and doodles by Nebraska writers: A new display in the Heritage Room

A new display in the small case in the front of the Heritage Room looks at a selection of writers’ artwork, with the idea that such efforts are an interesting, but often overlooked aspect of their creative lives. Included are illustrations by Ted Kooser, Paul Johnsgard, Mari Sandoz, Rudolph Umland, Dorothy Thomas, Timothy Schaffert, and James Solheim.

Mari Sandoz (1896-1966), among the most celebrated of Nebraska authors, wrote about the character of the people of the Great Plains, the conflicts between ranchers and farmers, white men and Indians, all shaped, in turn, by the harshness and beauty of the Plains environment. She was before her time in understanding how global financial interests drove the exploitation of the American frontier, and in her appreciation for the resulting destruction of the ecology of the Plains, and of the lives of her protagonists.

In the idiom of her own time, Sandoz was a “regionalist” writer, if we understand by regionalism, not localism or local color, but a disciplined cosmopolitanism attentive to the specifics of the history, language, and environment of a particular region.When Sandoz signed a book, she often made tiny sketch, you could almost just call it a doodle, next to her signature. Perhaps it is a spot along the Niobrara near the Sandoz homestead, but this is speculation. That sketch seems more “complete” in some cases than in others, but when all the elements are present, they are always about the same.

On display: Mari Sandoz, The Beaver Men: Spearheads of Empire, 1964. Signature and dedication on the Half-Title page.

Ask to see:Other signed copies, Sandoz page proofs.

Paul Johnsgard: Paul Johnsgard is, at one and the same time, a world renowned scholar of waterfowl behavior and the world’s most published ornithologist (ever!). His monographs and reference works on North American birds and bird groups, and on birds around the world provide the most comprehensive and accurate view of bird life, behavior and ecology available to us. Over 250,000 copies of his works on birds are scattered around the world, in four languages. He is a powerful advocate for regional and world wide bird and habitat conservation. Johnsgard has also written several classic works of regional natural history, all devoted to Nebraska—on the ecology and natural history of the Platte river, on the Sandhills, on the Niobrara river, on Nebraska as a whole, and on the world of the Prairie Dog.

Altogether, Johnsgard has written over 50 books, and many of them, especially those on bird behavior and on natural history, are illustrated with his wonderful black and white pen and ink drawings. He prefers to do his own drawings, noting that it has been easier to publish because he does not have to hire an artist. Besides, artists may be prone to mistakes. “I can actually look at forms of bird and see flaws,” he told a 1989 interviewer. Johnsgard prefers, for the most part, to draft full, life-size illustrations. The artwork you see reproduced in his books is then shrunk to fit the page.

On display: Paul Johnsgard, This Fragile Land: A Natural History of the Nebraska Sandhills, 1995. Signed copy with dedication to Norm and Jane Geske, with an additional drawing across from the title page.

Around the room: Drawings and two bird carvings by Paul Johnsgard.

Ask to see: Johnsgard manuscript collection, drawings for Dragons and Unicorns: A Natural History, 1982 (with Karin Johnsgard). Johnsgard talks about his writing and his artwork in three installments of our Ames Reading Series (including a collaborative reading with poet Twyla Hansen).

Also illustrated here are drawings by James Solheim and Rudolph Umland:

New Display for 2009 One Book, One Nebraska Author Bess Streeter Aldrich

A new display on the second floor of Bennett Martin library draws on the Heritage Room collection to show the chronological progression in the covers of Bess Streeter Aldrich's A Lantern in Her Hand, which has remained popular and in print since its first publication in 1928 (it went through 21 printings in that year alone). A Lantern in Her Hand is this year's One Book, One Nebraska Selection. Other Aldrich books and foreign language covers are included in the display.

In a 1952 article in the Christian Herald (reprinted in 1975 in Nebraska History magazine), Aldrich explained how she had come to write the book. She recalled a long-ago conversation with her mother that led her to try to write about the particular kind of woman that Abby Deal, the heroine of A Lantern in Her Hand, would represent. Aldrich’s mother spoke of a time when snow, sifting through the chinks of the cabin, made grotesque figures on surface of the quilts within. Bess responded with some sympathetic words about how hard things must have been and how unfair it must seem that her daughters should have it so easy in an era (this was in the 1920s) with all the modern conveniences. Her mother took this sharply: “She looked at me with an odd little expression and said: ‘Oh, save your pity. We had the best time in the world.’”

Other notable influences on the book came from a live broadcast on local Nebraska radio station KFAB in February, 1926. Aldrich asked listeners for “true incidents of pioneer life,” hoping to use the material to flesh out the character study, drawn from her own family history, that would be A Lantern in Her Hand. She got far more than she bargained for. It took, she recalled, fourteen months to go through the correspondence, diaries, and scrapbooks that she received in reply. She worked many things from this material into the book, and did more interviewing and research besides.

The book has been admired for its authenticity, beginning with a generation of readers who had intimate family knowledge of what the first European settlers experienced, and it has been much loved by readers who found their way to it.

Our display looks at other aspects of Bess Streeter Aldrich's writing career, including her efforts to get Hollywood interested in her work. Here is a cover from her most successful attempt with the film Cheers for Miss Bishop, which premiered at the Stuart Theater in Lincoln in January, 1941. We also glance at Aldrich's international popularity, and the display includes a Hindi version, illustrated here, of her 1935 novel, Spring Came On Forever.

New Heritage Room display features crime and mystery fiction

In Nebraska, the historical giants of crime fiction are Mignon Good Eberhart (1899-1996) and Jim Thompson (1906-1977). Eberhart was a classic creator of fictional detectives who combined her mysteries with elements of the romance novel. With some 59 novels to her credit, she is the most prolific Nebraska novelist ever. In her day, which stretched from the 1920s to the 1960s, she was very popular. By the late 1940s she was the third highest earning woman mystery writer in the world, right after Agatha Christie and Mary Roberts Rinehart.

Jim Thompson’s writing contrasted starkly with Eberhart’s. Growing up in Oklahoma and in the Sandhills around Burwell, Nebraska, Thompson had an intimate understanding of harsh realities of poverty and drink that could engulf the wished for gentility of middle class life. Thompson came to himself as a writer in Lincoln in the 1930s, under the tutelage of Lowry Wimberly. Thompson’s writing explored the dark side of the American experience, the inner world of the criminally insane, or the sudden fatal inspirations of a half-formed, trapped, and uncomforted American everyman. Thompson’s writing has a sharp bite. Readers and critics now have a greater appreciation for his work than they did during his lifetime.

If Mignon Eberhart’s heroines all find their way, from some exotic setting, to middle class dreams and ideals, Jim Thompson’s stories corrode middle class dreams and distort them into nightmares.

Along with books by Eberhart and Thompson, our display includes mysteries and crime fiction by these contemporary Nebraska authors who have gained recognition as being among the most popular and distinguished American writers working in these genres:

Omaha native and resident Richard Dooling is a lawyer who has written collaboratively with Stephen King. His scripts and novels are making their way into television and the movies. Dooling writes mysteries that offer a darkly comic views of contemporary cultural decay and technology, topics he also addresses in critically acclaimed non-fiction. His first novel, White Man’s Grave was a National Book Award finalist. His more recent Bet your Life is about investment, insurance fraud, and the corruption of cube life in an Omaha insurance company.

Sean Doolittle, from Hickman, is a master of the detective mystery whose books have won a number of awards, including an Amazon.com “best 100 books” award in 2001, “book of the year” awards from Forewords Magazine (2003), and Crimespree Magazine (2006), among others. Doolittle lived and worked in Los Angeles before moving, a few years back, to Omaha. His most recent books have Nebraska settings. Raindogs is set in the Nebraska Sandhills, and The Cleanup in Omaha. Both books have gotten rave reviews in the national press.

Alex Kava is an internationally best-selling mystery-thriller writer whose books have appeared on the New York Times best seller list, and on similar lists in Britain, Germany, Italy, and Australia. She has said that “I love using Nebraska as a setting because so many people have such a misconception of the state and it gives me an opportunity to share what it's really like.” Her gritty, carefully researched fiction is sometimes based on real events.

Omaha native and Omaha Westside graduate Julie Kaewert began to write mysteries after working for a London publisher. Her detective series carefully explores the intricacies of publishing and the rare book and manuscript trade. Famed London rare book dealer Ed Maggs, current proprietor of the famous Maggs Brothers Books, founded in Charles Dicken’s day by Uriah Maggs, has allowed Kaewert to include him as a character in her fiction under his own name. Kaewert’s books appeal to those who especially love literature and the book trade. Kaewert also co-wrote the novel that accompanied the screenplay for the movie, The Avengers.

Former Lincoln resident and actress turned mystery writer Harley Jane Kozak writes off-beat mysteries with a quirky comic bite and a romantic twist. Her work is popular with readers, especially with women, and has gotten great reviews from the national critics.

Falls City Nebraska native David Wiltse is a playwright, novelist, screenwriter, and tennis journalist. Wiltse’s acclaimed, prize winning plays have been produced in New York, London, Tokyo, South Africa and Sweden. He began to write for television to better support his family, he has said. He has written for a number of successful television series and movies. He began to write novels in the 1980s. His popular, fast paced thrillers include several recent novels set in the Falls City area. His awards include the Drama Desk Award for most promising playwright, and an Edgar Allen Poe Award for his television script for “Revenge of the Stepford Wives.”

Our crime and mystery display also includes novels by Lisa McClendon, Jean Potts, and Don Winslow.

Here is a link to our printer friendly crime and mystery fiction booklist.


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