Nebraska Authors

Dorothy was the sixth of ten children to Willard and Augusta Dodge Thomas. When Dorothy was seven, the family moved to Alberta, Canada, where they homesteaded near a logging company, often providing food and shelter to the loggers. The family moved back to Kansas when Dorothy was 12, and she attended school for the first time. A bright child, Dorothy showed immediate aptitude in writing stories and creating artwork, but always struggled with her other schoolwork. Other members of the Thomas family, especially Dorothy’s sister Kennetha, share Dorothy’s artistic strengths. Dorothy's mother Augusta moved her family to Bethany, Nebraska in 1914. Dorothy recieved her teaching certificate in 1918 and taught school throughout Nebraska for the next nine years. Her literary start came in Nebraska with the publication of one of her first stories in Prairie Schooner. Dorothy’s first publication was a poem entitled “The Beast Room,” which appeared in a 1927 issue. Selling her story “The Blue Doves” to Scribners in 1928 gave Dorothy the confidence to return her 1929 teaching contract unsigned: “sink or swim, I would risk everything, work at whatever jobs I could get, and write for my life and my living.”

The Heritage Room is the repository for Dorothy Thomas's literary estate. Complete description at Heritage Room Archives.

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Margaret Jacobs is a professor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. She is the Chancellor’s Professor of History at UNL, and served as the director of Womens and Gender Studies from 2006-2011. She was the 2015-16 Pitt Professor of American History and Institutions at Cambridge University in England. Before working at UNL, she taught at Mexico State University from 1997-2004. Jacobs is the author of over a dozen articles and three books. She has lectured widely in England, New Zealand, Australia and Canada. She has been the recipient of grants and fellowships from the Fulbright Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Spencer Foundation, and the American Council of Learned Studies. Jacobs specializes in Colonialism and Decolonization, Indigenous Peoples, Native Americans, the North American West, and Women. She has been a consultant on several films that are related to American Indian adoption and American Indian Women. Jacobs studies the history of the American West, and is interested in cross-cultural relations between women in the American West and other colonial settings. Her books include Endangered Encounters: Feminism and Pueblo Cultures, 1879-1934 (1999), White Mother to a Dark Race: Settler Colonialism, Maternalism, and the Removal of Indigenous Children in the American West and Australia, 1880-1940 (2009), and A Generation Removed: The Fostering and Adoption of Indigenous Children in the Postwar World (2014).

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Louise Pound was a distinguished scholar of linguistics and literature who taught at the University of Nebraska from 1898 to 1945. Her friendships and influence reached from Willa Cather, Lowry Wimberly, and Charles Gere, locally, to H.L. Mencken and Benjamin Botkin. She was a classmate and friend to Willa Cather. She was a founder and the first editor of American Speech, and H.L. Mencken wrote that "it was her work, more than that of any other philologian, that had set the investigation of American English on its legs, and all my own writings on the subject since 1910 have leaned heavily upon it." (art. in American Speech, 1945)

Pound served as President of the American Folklore Society, 1924-1926, President of the American Dialect Society, and President of the Modern Language Association (a vice president in 1916 and the MLA's first woman President in 1955). As she helped put the study of the American language and of American folklore on firmer empirical foundations, she helped change the broader understanding of the subject matter. The scientific study of American folklore revealed its diverse sources and defeated the then reigning prejudice that American folklore was entirely Anglo-Saxon in origin. Similarly, in her scholarship, as in Mencken's, American language emerged as part of a living American culture woven together from conflicting ethnic, national, and regional cultures. The vitality of the American culture Pound and her literary friend Willa Cather described contrasted with the emptiness Sinclair Lewis portrayed in Main Street. Cather and Pound’s understanding of culture as a diverse and conflicted reality in the lives of individuals and communities, their appreciation of how individuals created stories and lives from cultural materials, and their eye for telling detail pointed toward a view of America that coalesced in the emergence of literary regionalism in the 1930s. Regionalism, in which Lowry Wimberly's Prairie Schooner played a leading role, pushed back the cynicism of the 1920s and favored a pragmatic view of culture that helped Americans sustain their unique virtues in the crisis of the 1930s.

Pound would be a sponsor and supporter of Lowry Wimberly in the English department at UNL. Benjamin Botkin, already a well known folklorist, came to the University of Nebraska to study with her. Her brother was the distinguished botanist and jurist Roscoe Pound. She corresponded with H.L. Mencken and Dorothy Canfield Fisher.

Aside from her many academic honors, she was a pioneering sportswoman, a world class tennis player, golfer and cyclist.

See the Louise Pound papers at the NSHS.

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