Nebraska Authors

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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Dawes, a Republican, served under three GOP Presidents: He was campaign chairman and comptroller of the currency for William McKinley; Vice President of the United States (1925-1929) under Calvin Coolidge; and Ambassador to England under Herbert Hoover. Charles Dawes was also awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his 1925 "Dawes Plan" addressing the crisis arising from the German reparations settlement after WW I.

Dawes was the son of Civil War General Rufus Dawes and Mary Gates Dawes. Dawes' uncle was James Dawes, Nebraska's governor from 1883-1887. Charles Dawes began his career as a very successful Nebraska businessman, by the turn of the 20th century, following the Depression of 1893, he was a millionaire. Dawes found close friends in William Jennings Bryan and General John J. Pershing. Another associate was Lincoln banker George W. Holmes

Dawes Middle School in Lincoln, NE is named after him.

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John Bratt arrived in Nebraska in 1865 after leaving business ventures in Manchester, England and Chicago, Illinois. He took up work as a so-called "bull-whacker" for an ox-team based freighting company out of Nebraska City. In 1869 he was hired as a book keeper by the Coe and Carter Cattle Company, an expanding business running cattle herds in Lincoln County, Nebraska out of headquarters near Ft. McPherson, Nebraska. He later formed John Bratt and Company with Coe and Carter and ran between ten and fifteen thousand head of cattle in the area out of his own ranch southeast of North Platte. When homesteaders began to make old fashioned ranching difficult, Bratt retired from ranching and acquired other business, including North Platte stockyards, and real estate and insurance businesses. He served two terms as North Platte's mayor and as a commissioner of Frontier County. There are John Bratt Collections at the Nebraska State Historical Society and at the Autry Library, Autry National Center Institute for the Study of the American West, Los Angeles, CA.

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