Nebraska Authors

Cook, raised in Michigan, went west to Texas in the 1870s and became a cowboy at a time when American cowboys were still learning their trade from the Mexicans, capturing wild cattle in the Llano Estacado in southwest Texas and driving them north to sell at railheads or ranches in Kansas and Colorado. He survived many cattle drives. He served as a scout for the U.S. military in the Apache uprising. He moved north and worked as a market hunter out of Colorado and Wyoming, selling game to the railroads and hotels. He built a business as a hunting guide to wealthy English aristocrats and the American rich.

Even before he settled on fossil rich land in Nebraska, he met and befriended some of America's most distinguished geologists and paleontologists, including Ferdinand Hayden, Clarence King, and the dueling paleontologists Edward Cope and O.C. Marsh. He acquired the Old 04 Ranch in the Niobrara valley by marriage and expanded and built it into the Agate Springs Ranch. He welcomed paleontologists to excavate the unique fossils on the ranch, and his son Harold J. Cook became a distinguished paleontologist.

James H. Cook's memoir Fifty Years on the Old Frontier, 1923, is especially interesting because it recounts his 35 year friendship with the Oglala Lakota Sioux chief Red Cloud. He probably knew Red Cloud better than any other white man. Red Cloud and his band visited Cook on the Agate Springs Ranch on many occasions and for a time the Sioux tried mightily, without success, to have Cook appointed as their Indian Agent. Cook was also a friend of the Northern Cheyenne.

In 1965 the National Park Service acquired land from the Cook family for Agate Fossil Beds National Monument. Thomas Myers, curator of anthropology for the University of Nebraska State Museum at UNL, was awarded a contract in 1988 to identify, describe and catalog artifacts, photographs and documents from the James H. Cook collection.

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Pulitzer Prize winning poet Karl Shapiro taught at the University of Nebraska from 1956 to 1966. Shapiro exerted immense influence on the Nebraska literary community during the ten years he spent in Lincoln. It was Shapiro's presence at the University of Nebraska that brought the young Ted Kooser to Lincoln in 1963.

When Shapiro arrived in Lincoln, he was already a Pulitzer Prize winner, he had won the Jeannette S. Davis prize (1942), the Levinson Prize and the Contemporary Poetry Prize (1943), the Shelley Memorial Prize (1945) and a Guggenheim Fellowship to study in Rome (1945-1946). He had been U.S. "Poet Laureate" --Poet Consultant to the Library of Congress, 1946-1947. Thus distinguished, Shapiro was brought to the University of Nebraska to be the editor of Prairie Schooner. This was at the instigation of Mari Sandoz, according to Sandoz's biographer, Helen Winter Stauffer. Sandoz knew that Lowry Wimberly, Prairie Schooner's founding editor was ill, and she had met Shapiro and been impressed. As an urban creature and as a poet with "radical sympathies" Shapiro did not fit into Lincoln society or the University very comfortably. Shapiro resigned abruptly from the editorship of Prairie Schooner after the university administration forced him to censor a story. He soon left Lincoln.

Shapiro was a deeply learned scholar of modern poetry and a no-nonsense creative spirit. His students greatly valued his editorial skill. Shapiro's students at the University of Nebraska included Ted Kooser and Roy Scheele.

Reviewers have suggested that Shapiro's career after he left Nebraska may have been stunted by his abrasiveness. His novel Edsel, as well as his second volume of autobiography, Reports of My Death (1990) reveal his thoughts about Lincoln. Ted Kooser reviewed Shapiro's autobiography in LJS, April 15, 1990.

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Ernie Chambers is an African-American State Legislator who served a 38-year term in the Nebraska State Legislature representing the 11th District in Omaha, ended by new term limits in 2009. He later returned for another full 2 terms in the Legislature. Chambers is the longest-serving state senator in the history of Nebraska. He ran for a position on the Omaha School Board, but did not get elected. He also failed as a write-in candidate for the City Council. He is also the only African-American to have run for governor and the U.S. Senate in Nebraska's history. Chambers is famous for poetry on political topics, biting political speeches, and command of legislative procedure. Much of his poetry was handed out in the form of broadsheets in the legislative chamber at the State Capitol.

Chambers is a towering figure in the history of his Omaha community, and in the history of the Nebraska State Legislature. Omaha native Tekla Agbala Ali Johnson has written a political biography of Chambers: Free Radical: Ernest Chambers, Black Power and the Politics of Race. 2012.

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