Nebraska Authors

Andersen was born in Omaha, and is a graduate of Westside High School. He graduated magna cum laude from Harvard College in 1976, where he served as an editor on the Harvard Lampoon. In 1986, he co-founded Spy magazine with E. Graydon Carter. They sold Spy in 1991 (it died in 1998).
He began his career in journalism at Time, where during the 1980s he was an award-winning writer on politics and criminal justice before becoming, for eight years, the magazine’s architecture and design critic.
Andersen is host and co-creator of Studio 360, the cultural magazine show produced by Public Radio International and WNYC. It is broadcast on 217 stations and distributed by podcast to almost 1 million listeners each week. The show won Peabody Awards for broadcast excellence in both 2005 and 2013.
From 2001 through 2004 he served as a creative consultant to Universal Television, co-creating the Trio channel and helping to shape Universal’s other cable programming.
From 2007 to 2009 he was editor-at-large for Random House, responsible for finding, conceiving, and overseeing non-fiction books. He has been a writer and columnist for New York ("The Imperial City"), The New Yorker ("The Culture Industry"), and Time ("Spectator"). He was fired from New York in 1996 for refusing to kill a banking story that upset a publishing executive. He was also architecture and design critic for Time for nine years. His weighty novels, especially Heyday (2007) and True Believer (2013) have received stellar reviews.

Read More

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.

Read More

Rhodes moved to New Mexico in 1881 with his parents, and spent much of his life in that state. His work was published in newspapers and magazines, including Land of Sunshine, Out West, and McClure's. His longer works were serialized in The Saturday Evening Post and some were later published in book form. Though he was a completely self-taught writer, his western fiction was much admired. A New York Times reviewer considered him a peer of Owen Wister, and historians (Bernard DeVoto, for one) and critics praised his realism and literary skill. Despite his literary success, he was never paid much for his writing and died broke. He was buried, at his own request, at the summit of the San Andres Mountains on the land of his old ranch home.

BYU has a Rhodes manuscript collection and the Alamagordo, NM Public Library has a special collection of his published work.

Rhodes belonged to the special generation of writers of westerns who experienced something of the Old West in its last years, see also George W. Barrington and George Shedd. Other prolific Nebraska writers of the western include Wayne C. Lee and Edwin Booth.

Read More