Edwin Ford Piper

Born 1871-02-08 Auburn, NE (USA)

Died 1939-05-17
Iowa City, IA (USA)

Born in Auburn, Nebraska, Piper based much of his poetry on his experience of living homesteaders and cattlemen in the 1880s. He received college degrees from the University of Nebraska and taught for the University of Nebraska English department for two years before joining the University of Iowa faculty for the remainder of his career where he taught Chaucer and writing. He published five books of his own poetry and was a significant collector of old time ballads and songs. Writing in Poetry magazine, Harriet Monroe called Piper's Barbed Wire and Wayfarers "a broken epic of our heroic period, our pioneer period of adventure in the wide spaces of the West."

The University of Iowa Libraries Special Collections has the Edwin Ford Piper Folklore Collection (1929-1941)

Places Lived

Auburn, NE
Lincoln, NE
Cambridge, MA
Iowa City, IA

Author Of

Nonfiction
Poetry

Keywords

Frontier Poetry; Folklore; Literary Essays; Homesteaders; Cattle Ranching; Poetery

Education

Bachelor of Arts Degree, 1897, University of Nebraska, Lincoln, NE
Master of Arts Degree, 1900, University of Nebraska, Lincoln, NE
Graduate Studies, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA

Occupation

Professor of English, University of Nebraska, Lincoln, NE
Professor at University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA

Places Worked

University of Nebraska, Lincoln
University of Iowa

Associations

His wife Janet Elizabeth Pressley Piper is also a Nebraska poet.

Bibliography

Barbed Wire. 1917.
The Land of the Aiouwas. 1922.
Barbed Wire and Wayfarers. 1924.
Paintrock Road. 1927.
Canterbury Pilgrims. (1935) 1989.
Nebraska Poetry: A Sesquicentennial Anthology, 1867-2017. (Contributor)

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