Nebraska Authors

Born in Belgium, Vifquain attended the Royal Military Academy in Brussels, then served in the Belgian Army for one year before moving to the United States in 1857 and settling in Saline County, Nebraska. Vifquain fought in the Civil War and was appointed commander of the Ninety-Seventh Illinois which fought at the Battle of Fort Blakely; he was awarded the Medal of Honor for his heroic actions in that fight. When Vifquain returned to Nebraska, he ran for a seat in Congress but did not win. He attended the Nebraska Constitutional Convention and was appointed U.S. Consul to Columbia by President Grover Cleveland. Vifquain founded the Daily State Democrat in 1879. He became the adjutant general of Nebraska, then served in the Spanish-American War as commander of the 3rd Nebraska Infantry Regiment following the resignation of Colonel William Jennings Bryan. Vifquain wrote a book about his life called The 1862 Plot to Kidnap Jefferson Davis. Vifquain died at home in Lincoln, Nebraska in 1904.

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Louise Pound was a distinguished scholar of linguistics and literature who taught at the University of Nebraska from 1898 to 1945. Her friendships and influence reached from Willa Cather, Lowry Wimberly, and Charles Gere, locally, to H.L. Mencken and Benjamin Botkin. She was a classmate and friend to Willa Cather. She was a founder and the first editor of American Speech, and H.L. Mencken wrote that "it was her work, more than that of any other philologian, that had set the investigation of American English on its legs, and all my own writings on the subject since 1910 have leaned heavily upon it." (art. in American Speech, 1945)

Pound served as President of the American Folklore Society, 1924-1926, President of the American Dialect Society, and President of the Modern Language Association (a vice president in 1916 and the MLA's first woman President in 1955). As she helped put the study of the American language and of American folklore on firmer empirical foundations, she helped change the broader understanding of the subject matter. The scientific study of American folklore revealed its diverse sources and defeated the then reigning prejudice that American folklore was entirely Anglo-Saxon in origin. Similarly, in her scholarship, as in Mencken's, American language emerged as part of a living American culture woven together from conflicting ethnic, national, and regional cultures. The vitality of the American culture Pound and her literary friend Willa Cather described contrasted with the emptiness Sinclair Lewis portrayed in Main Street. Cather and Pound’s understanding of culture as a diverse and conflicted reality in the lives of individuals and communities, their appreciation of how individuals created stories and lives from cultural materials, and their eye for telling detail pointed toward a view of America that coalesced in the emergence of literary regionalism in the 1930s. Regionalism, in which Lowry Wimberly's Prairie Schooner played a leading role, pushed back the cynicism of the 1920s and favored a pragmatic view of culture that helped Americans sustain their unique virtues in the crisis of the 1930s.

Pound would be a sponsor and supporter of Lowry Wimberly in the English department at UNL. Benjamin Botkin, already a well known folklorist, came to the University of Nebraska to study with her. Her brother was the distinguished botanist and jurist Roscoe Pound. She corresponded with H.L. Mencken and Dorothy Canfield Fisher.

Aside from her many academic honors, she was a pioneering sportswoman, a world class tennis player, golfer and cyclist.

See the Louise Pound papers at the NSHS.

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A strikingly influential and nationally known Lincoln journalist. Lawrence first came to the Lincoln Star in 1906, as a reporter. He became City Editor in 1911. He would serve as the newspaper's editor and managing editor for some 40 years until his death in 1957. He was a close associate and 1936 and 1942 campaign manager for Senator George Norris. He was a vocal supporter of the move to a one-house legislature and collaborated with Senator Norris in the writing of Norris's autobiography Fighting Liberal. In his early years at the Star, Lawrence played a decisive role in keeping the University of Nebraska campus in Lincoln, and in getting the state to pursue the building of the new (present) state capitol building on a pay-as-you-go basis in the 1920s. He later served on the Capitol Mural Commission and collaborated with Chet Ager in establishing the Lincoln public park system. He helped establish the Nebraska public power and irrigation systems. He was especially influential in setting up the Tri-County Project which regulates irrigation in the Upper Platte basin in Nebraska.

In 1940, Lawrence was appointed to head the Nebraska State Historical Society, a position he held for 15 years. In 1952 President Harry Truman appointed Lawrence to chair the Missouri Basin Commission, an 11 person commission including three U.S. Senators and three congressmen, which held public hearings and accumulated 6,000 pages of testimony before submitting its report to President Eisenhower in 1953.

Lawrence was a remarkable public servant, but not without faults. When Rudolph Umland, editor (and later Director) of the Nebraska Federal Writers Project, joined the Project in 1935, he found that Lawrence had established his ex-mistress, a former Lincoln Public Schools teacher, as Director. Both the Washington leadership of the Federal Project and locals found her leadership disfunctional, but they were not allowed to fire her. Lawrence reached out to his Washington connections to prevent that. Word came from Washington that she would "have her desk" as long as there was a Nebraska Writers' Project. The best the reformers could do was to move that desk to her private apartment, and the Project continued to pay her as an editor until it ended in the first years of WW II.

When Lawrence died, letters of condolence poured in, from former President Harry Truman, from U.S. Senators and from Congress, from journalists and newspaper columnists from the New York Times to the Hastings Tribune. These were collected by Lawrence's wife, Helen, and placed in a scrapbook which she donated to the library. Additional James E. Lawrence papers are held at the Nebraska State Historical Society.

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