From 1913 to 1941, Neihardt concentrated his artistic energies on writing A Cycle of the West, an epic poem about the American West composed of five separate songs. During these years, he developed the pattern of doing other kinds of writing to earn money and sometimes to acquire material, then allowing himself an extended period of time to work on his poetry. For example, Outing magazine commissioned The River and I. It was published separately as a first-person adventure or travelogue, but it also supplied a great deal of the background material for The Song of Hugh Glass (1915) and The Song of Three Friends (1919), which were the first two sections of A Cycle of the West. Neihardt's 1920 biography of Jedediah Smith (an earlier American explorer who was the first to cross the Sierra Nevada), The Splendid Wayfaring, provided material for The Song of Jed Smith, published in 1941. Actually, it was while searching for material for the fifth poem of the series (The Song of the Messiah) that Neihardt first got in touch with Black Elk, visiting the Pine Ridge Reservation with his son Sigurd in August 1930, and returning with his daughter Enid in 1931. Black Elk Speaks was published in 1932 and The Song of the Messiah in 1935.
From 1912 to 1920, Neihardt worked as literary editor for the Minneapolis Journal. In 1917, the University of Nebraska awarded him an honorary doctorate in literature and, in 1921, he was appointed Poet Laureate of Nebraska. In 1923, he was given a nonteaching chair at the University of Nebraska. During these years he also began to conduct speaking tours, which were enthusiastically received and financially profitable. He published The Song of the Indian Wars in 1925 and his Collected Poems in 1926, for which many people expected him to win the 1927 Pulitzer Prize. The Pulitzer, however, was not awarded to him. Perhaps disillusioned as a result, he stopped writing for six years. During that time, he worked as literary editor for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, where he continued until 1930. He received an honorary doctorate from Creighton University in Omaha in 1929. The recognition that Neihardt received and did not receive during these years speaks to the regional nature of his reputation and the way his subject matter, the settlement of the American West, defined him.
