In 1881, John G. Neihardt was born in Sharpsburg, Illinois, to impoverished parents who passed their interest in reading and the creative life on to him, but found it difficult to make a living in the American Midwest. His father named him John Greenleaf after the popular American poet John Greenleaf Whittier. (Neihardt later changed his middle name to Gneisenau in honor of a German military officer who helped defeat Napoleon.) John showed early signs of being a precocious child, and at the age of eleven during an illness, he had a mystical experience that convinced him of his vocation as a poet. His father, often unemployed, abandoned the family when John was about ten, and his mother moved with her son to Kansas and then Nebraska to live near her parents.
Neihardt entered Nebraska Normal School (now Nebraska State Teachers' College) at the age of twelve, working as the college bell-ringer to pay his way. He excelled to a degree beyond that of his classmates, and enrolled in a special classics program. He graduated in 1897 at the age of sixteen and immediately began writing poetry, determined to live his vocation as a poet. In 1900, he published The Divine Enchantment, a book-length poem about Hindu deities, and in 1904, another long poem, The Wind God's Wooing, about a Greek fisherman turned into a god. Neither was successful, but both are early indications of Neihardt's fascination with spirituality and cultures outside the European-American mainstream. Around this time, Neihardt lived with his mother in Nebraska near an Omaha reservation, which probably provided his first acquaintance with American Indians.
