Nebraska Authors

Rudolph “Rudy” Umland, 1907-1993, was a local farm boy who grew up near Eagle, Nebraska and became a prolific writer of essays, short fiction, local history, and book reviews. He was educated sporadically at the University of Nebraska in the 1930s. When he was too poor to stay at the University, he returned to his parent's farm and then took off to travel and find work as a hobo, riding the rails. When he eventually returned to the University, his intelligence and the generous sense of humor displayed in his writing attracted the interest of Lowry Wimberly, editor of Prairie Schooner. Wimberly and Umland became close friends and Wimberly persuaded Umland to join the WPA's Nebraska Federal Writers' Project. Wimberly and Mari Sandoz guided the project from behind the scenes, and helped Umland rescue the Project from a disastrous political appointee who was its first director. Umland became the Project's de facto editor, Editor (from 1935), Assistant State Director (1936-1940), and later State Director (1940-1941). Umland organized and edited the Project’s most significant publications. In his work at the Project, Umland befriended or worked with many writers, including Mari Sandoz, Weldon Kees, and Loren Eiseley. Heritage Room collections include his 15 volume Scrapbook, manuscripts and many letters in several collections. These collections document his early life, his education, travels as a hobo, work on the Federal Writers’ Project, his later writing, his military service and government career. He was an important informant for Helen Winter Stauffer in writing her biography of Mari Sandoz, and for Gale Christianson in writing his biography of Loren Eiseley.

Also see
The Nebraska Federal Writers Project: Remembering Writers of the 1930s for more about Umland.

Umland was also close to Wilbur Gaffney and Robert Carlson

dsc

Read More

Forsberg is a distinguished American nature photographer and environmental journalist who has published a number of books and co-produced NET/PBS documentaries focused on the Great Plains. He began his career as a staff photographer for NEBRASKAland Magazine. His website michaelforsberg.com lists current projects.

Forsberg closed his successful Lincoln, NE photography gallery (2015) to work on his publishing projects.

Nebraska authors Ted Kooser and David Wishart contributed chapters to Forsberg's 2009 (University of Chicago Press) book Great Plains: America's Lingering Wild, which won the Center for Great Plains Studies: Great Plains Distinguished Book Prize, The Nebraska Center for the Book: Nebraska Book Award, and The Association of American Publishers: PROSE Book Award.

For the PBS documentary Follow the Water, first aired in August, 2018 (produced by Christine Lesiak), Forsberg and videographer Pete Stegen, joined at times by other friends, completed a two-month traverse of the Platte River Basin, from its headwaters to the Missouri, covering some 1300 miles by bicycle, foot and canoe, to examine every aspect of the water's impact on land, wildlife and human settlement and the concerns of conservationists throughout the basin.

Forsberg describes himself as a conservation photographer, and a writer of natural history.

See also: Nature photographers: Thomas Mangelsen and Joel Sartore
Writing on conservation and natural history: Paul Johnsgard.

dsc

Read More

Eiseley is one of the most widely read and highly regarded nature writers of the twentieth century. His literary admirers and correspondents included the poet W.H. Auden, the social critic Lewis Mumford, and the science fiction writer Ray Bradbury. He was a student of Lowry Wimberly, in the English Department at the University of Nebraska, but he also studied geology and paleontology and pursued a degree in anthropology. He was a member of the 1932 University of Nebraska expedition that discovered and excavated many of the mammalian fossils familiar to Nebraskans visiting the State Museum in Morrill Hall in Lincoln. In 1936, in hard times, Wimberly got Eiseley a job with the Nebraska Federal Writers' Project (Eiseley page).

After Eiseley left Nebraska, his career as an anthropologist took him from the University of Kansas to Oberlin College, then to the University of Pennsylvania where he was Benjamin Franklin Professor of Anthropology and the History of Science.

Eiseley was on the `Honor Roll' in Best Short Stories, 1936, for the story `Mop to K.C.' The Immense Journey, based on his 1930s field work in Nebraska, was the book that made him famous and gained him a wide audience. In 1959, Darwin's Century was rated the year's best non-fiction book. His 1960 Firmament of Time was honored as the best popular science book that year.

Heritage Room Eiseley collections complete listing is here. That listing includes Eiseley association books, mostly given to him by his parents as a child; the complete Christianson-Eiseley collection of materials that Gale Christianson used in writing The Fox at the Wood's Edge: A Biography of Loren Eiseley; the Nebraska Academy of Science Eiseley Donation, including the C. Bertram Schultz-Eiseley correspondence; and local and library collections of physical artifacts associated with Eiseley, books in several languages, manuscript materials, and letters. Christine Lesiak Reflections of a Bonehunter: Transcripts of Interviews 1994 (includes Ray Bradbury), materials for the ETV documentary on Eiseley, is also a useful resource.

dsc

Read More