Nebraska Authors

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, 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.
There is a longer biographical essay on-line here in our no longer maintained blog.

dsc

Read More

He had an interesting and somewhat improvisational career. He began his career painting cattle portraits for proud farmers and stock breeders. In about 1897 he joined the Campbell Brother's Circus, a large, nationally known circus which had winter quarters in Fairbury, Nebraska. There, for a decade, he painted circus posters, circus wagons and also worked as a clown. He left the circus in 1907 and settled in Lincoln, Nebraska. He painted backgrounds for Vaudeville, and many theatrical backdrops in Lincoln and around the region. He painted murals for public buildings and churches.

Among his best known murals was a panoramic view of the United States stretching around the walls of an auto dealership at 14th and Q Streets in Lincoln. In the 1930s Manrose, working for the Works Progress Administration, painted portraits of Lincoln's public libraries. In 1981 this artwork was restored by local artist Lynn Boyer and hung in the libraries and library offices. The largest of these, a 2-by-3 1/2-foot portrait of the main city library built in 1902 and demolished in 1961 shows the library as it was known to Lincoln residents like Loren Eiseley and Mari Sandoz. It still hangs near the library offices. In the 1950s, just before he died in 1957, Manrose painted backgrounds for display windows at Ben Simon's and Hovland-Swanson's department stores in Lincoln.

Manrose is listed in Susan V. Craig, Biographical Dictionary of Kansas Artists (active before 1945). 2009.

Nebraska Author Gertrude Campbell Wehling contributed to a history of the Campbell Circus: see Ed Bardy, Tales from a tent : story of the Campbell Bros. Circus : the canvas that covered the plains. 1981. In HR

dsc

Read More

Frederic Clements, born in Lincoln, Nebraska, gained fame as a botanist and as one of the founders of the science of ecology. He was a leading figure in Charles E. Bessey's Botanical Seminar, "Sem. Bot.," which functioned independently from the University of Nebraska's Botany Department. Clements was a close friend and associate of both Bessey and of Roscoe Pound, while Pound continued to pursue botanical interests. The importance of the circle is described in Ronald C. Tobey, Saving the Prairies: The Life Cycle of the Founding School of American Plant Ecology, 1895-1955, 1981. Bessey, Clements, Pound, John Weaver and their followers transformed ecology from a metaphor into a science. Clements gained special renown for his work on ecological methodologies and for suggesting a paradigm of the succession of plant communities that, though later overturned, was a model for thinking about larger questions in the scientific study of ecology. He lived in Lincoln until about 1907. Clements was married to Edith Schwartz Clements, also a Nebraska author and famous botanist in her own right.

Melvin Gilmore, a founder of the field of ethnobotany, was Clement's student at the University of Nebraska.

dsc

Read More