Author: John Gneisenau Neihardt

John Gneisenau Neihardt built a career as an American poet, critic, and prose writer whose work repeatedly returned to the history and cultures of the Great Plains. Black Elk Speaks grew from his 1930 meetings with the Oglala Lakota visionary Nicholas Black Elk, who asked Neihardt to carry his account to a wider audience. The University of Nebraska Press describes the book as biography, Native history, and spiritual testimony, while its complete edition adds scholarship by Philip J. Deloria and Raymond J. DeMallie. Neihardt also wrote the five-part epic A Cycle of the West. Nebraska named him its first poet laureate, and he later joined the University of Missouri faculty. His role in Black Elk Speaks is best understood as the writer who shaped and transmitted Black Elk's narrated experiences, not as their original subject.