Nebraska Authors

Hiram Hisanori Kano was born to a distinguished noble family in Japan. When he was a young man, William Jennings Bryan encouraged him to move to Nebraska to study agriculture. Kano had farmed for several years near Litchfield, Nebraska, when George Beecher, Episcopal Bishop of Western Nebraska enlisted him to minister to Japanese immigrants who were agricultural laborers in the region. Kano was ordained a priest and served Episcopal Japanese churches in North Platte and Mitchell. He taught immigrants English and helped them with legal affairs, while also advocating for rights for Japanese Americans in the state legislature. On Sunday, December 7, 1941, the day Pearl Harbor was bombed, Kano had conducted the morning service in North Platte and was arrested that afternoon. He spent most of three years in internment camps and jails due to his family and political connections and his advocacy for Japanese immigrants. After the war ended, Kano earned a Master of Divinity degree at Nashotah House Seminary in Wisconsin. He returned to Western Nebraska, where he continued to conduct religious services, teach, and advocate for Japanese immigrants. Kano became a naturalized American citizen as soon as it was legally permitted in 1953. He retired in 1957, when he and his wife Ai (Ivy) Nagai Kano moved to Ft. Collins, Colorado, where their daughter lived.

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Ricker was a journalist, newspaper editor and judge in the Chadron area after the Civil War. Intending to write a history of the settlement of the West from a Native American perspective, he collected over 1500 pages of unique and irreplaceable interviews with Native American informants, frontier scouts and settlers. He was unable to pull the materials together into a book during his lifetime, but the tablets were donated to the Nebraska State Historical Association. They are among the most significant eye-witness source materials on the Indian Wars and western settlement in Nebraska and the broader West.

The Nebraska State Historical Society has the Eli S. Ricker Manuscript Collection [RG1227]. Addison Sheldon recognized the importance of the collection and, as an old Populist Party crony and Chadron friend of Judge Ricker, was able to obtain it for the NSHS. Mari Sandoz was the first person to assess the collection when she was hired to arrange it under FERA, a Depression era aid program.

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A low level American diplomat and one-time Embassy Press-Attaché, Sterling became a popular crime writer in the 1950s. He lived in Rome, Italy for a number of years. The 1967 crime comedy-drama "The Honey Pot" was based on Sterling's 1955 novel The Evil of the Day, by way of a play adaptation of the novel "Mr. Fox of Venice," by Frederick Knott. The Evil of the Day was itself a meditation on Ben Johnson's 1606 play Volpone. The film version was directed by Joseph Mankiewicz and starred Rex Harrison, Susan Hayward, Cliff Robertson, Edie Adams, and Maggie Smith.

Sterling was especially popular in France, and a number of his books such as his police procedurals, but also some of his travel books as well, appeared in French translation. The Evil of the Day published as Le Tricheur de Venise received France's grand prix de littérature policière for foreign authors in 1960. In the United States, his The House without a Door received a 1951 Edgar nomination.

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