Nebraska Authors

Jackson, Civil War veteran and a writer, photographer and painter, is considered by many to have been the most important photographer of the American West. Jackson lived and worked in Omaha from 1867 to 1879. While working out of Omaha, he photographed Pawnee and Omaha tribe members from the area, and new settlements and landscapes along the Union Pacific as far as Promontory Point, Utah. In 1870 Ferdinand Hayden recruited Jackson to accompany his Western survey, which included much of the Rocky Mountains, Yellowstone, and areas as far south as Arizona and New Mexico and lasted 11 years. Thomas Moran was the expedition's artist. The expedition photographs made Jackson's reputation.

Scottsbluff National Monument houses the largest collection anywhere of Jackson's paintings, made late in life, but reflecting real events that he saw along the Oregon Trail in its heyday. Jackson had first crossed Nebraska in 1866 working as a bullwhacker for a freighting company. His photographic survey of the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago The White City (as it was) is also very famous. He also photographed the Trans-Mississippi and International Exposition (World's Fair) held in Omaha in 1898.

See also: Frank A. Rinehart

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William Lee Miller, son of a peripatetic Presbyterian minister, grew up in Laramie, WY, Hutchinson, KS, and Lincoln, Nebraska. Miller earned a BA at the University of Nebraska, and a second BA from Yale Divinity School. He then joined Adali Stevenson's unsuccessful 1956 Presidential campaign, where he worked as a speech writer, he then returned to Yale, earning his Ph.D. from Yale in religious social ethics in 1958. He had a long career as a writer, scholar, and college professor. He taught from 1982-1999 in the University of Virginia religious studies department, where he was Commonwealth professor and Thomas C. Sorensen professor of political and social thought.

Miller was perhaps best known for books about Lincoln and slavery, including Lincoln's Virtues: An Ethical Biography, 2002 and Arguing About Slavery: The Great Battle in the United States Congress, 1996. He also ventured into more modern history, with the book Two Americans: Truman, Eisenhower and a Dangerous World, 2012 and a book about his own experiences serving as a three-term city Alderman in New Haven, The Fifteenth Ward and the Great Society, 1966, among others.

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Gaffney was another protege of the University of Nebraska's Lowry Wimberly. He met up with Nebraska writer Rudolph Umland during Umland's travels as a hobo in the depths of the Great Depression. Umland preserved one of Gaffney's drawings from that time in his scrapbook. Gaffney was also a participant in the rambling discussions that accompanied late night visits to Wyuka Cemetery and country walks recounted by Loren Eiseley and Rudolph Umland, among the Lincoln writers of the late 1920s and the 1930s.

After graduating from the University of Nebraska in 1927, Gaffney went east and pursued a twenty year career as an editor. He joined the staff of the magazine American Mercury when H.L. Mencken was still editor. He edited the American Writers Series for the American Book Company. He worked as a librarian and writer for the Army and the Air Force during the war years. He also worked as a freelance editor.

He taught at New York University, City College of New York, among others, and returned to the University of Nebraska in 1949 to teach English. The Gaff (as he was sometimes known) refused to pursue a doctorate, and his status at the University suffered somewhat for that. But he was greatly appreciated by students, and seemed to attract to himself many of those students who were serious about creative careers. Glenna Luschei wrote (letter to Jane Geske, March 26, 1986) that it was Gaffney who introduced her to Ted Kooser, which led to her publishing Kooser's A Local Habitation and a Name. He taught Gail Rock and Marilyn Coffey at UNL. Many other writers remember him fondly. Ted Kooser served as his literary executor.
In many ways Gaffney was a successor to Lowry Wimberly as a literary mentor for Nebraska writers, though his importance in this role is more a matter of oral tradition than it should be.

Gaffney served as an associate editor of Prairie Schooner 1955-56. Wilbur and Elizabeth Gaffney are the donors of the big display case in the Heritage Room.

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