Nebraska Authors

Ron Hansen was born and raised in Omaha, NE, where he attended Creighton Preparatory School and Creighton University. After serving in the US Army, Hansen went on to study creative writing at the University of Iowa Writer's Workshop under celebrated author John Irving, with whom he developed an ongoing friendship. He is the author of numerous award-winning novels, short stories, and essays. Two of his novels have been adapted as motion pictures: The Assassination of Jesse James By the Coward Robert Ford (starring Brad Pitt) and Mariette in Ecstasy.

Hansen is an ordained deacon in the Catholic Church, and has published collection of essays on faith and fiction: A Stay Against Confusion. His faith has informed his novels as well, including the darkly thrilling Mariette in Ecstasy, about a young nun experiencing a crisis of faith. He has said that his interest in writing literary westerns stems from his childhood in Nebraska and the state's wide-open landscape. His 2016 novel The Kid (about Billy the Kid) completed a trilogy of western novels examining the lives of real outlaws that began with the publication of Desperadoes (the Dalton gang) in 1979 and continued with his The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford in 1983.

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Graduate student of Hartley Burr Alexander. Blish sought to write her Masters thesis on Native American art, and in 1926 discovered, through contact with W.O. Roberts, then a clerk at the Pine Ridge Agency, the ledger drawings of the late (d. 1913) Amos Bad Heart Bull. The drawings were in the possession of his sister, Dolly Pretty Cloud, and were her most precious possession.

After considerable negotiation, Miss Blish was able to rent the drawings for a modest annual fee (1927-1940). Hartley Burr Alexander, her advisor, had the ledger photographed at his own expense, and made two copies, one for himself and one for Blish. In the difficult time of the 1930s, Alexander obtained grants for Blish to complete her manuscript. Mari Sandoz wrote an introduction to the work. But Blish's early death, in 1941, delayed publication. When Dolly Pretty Cloud died in 1947, the ledger itself was buried with her.

Sandoz's judgment of the historical importance of Amos Bad Heart Bull's artwork, and Sandoz' and Alexander's high opinion of Blish's manuscript have withstood the test of time. The University of Nebraska Press published Blish's manuscript in 1967 as A Pictographic History of the Oglala Sioux. Alexander had a few of the photographs colored for a 1938 collection by a French publisher, and that is the source of the few colored pictures in the book.

The Nebraska State Historical Society has a Helen Heather Blish Collection that includes manuscript and notes.

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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.

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