First published in 1946, Trumpet to the World can be seen as a landmark novel, rare for its profound rendering of a black man s experience in Jim Crow America and prophetic of the social changes to come in the next decade. Its protagonist, Willie Jim, could have been brutalized by his family s hard existence in Georgia, buthe heads out early; could have been thoroughly demoralized by bigotry and discrimination in a hundred forms, but he learns to read and write and thinks for himself; could have been emotionally unfulfilled, but he learns to love in the midst of hate. After his...

Originally published just months after his marriage to Mona Martinsen, the poems collected in Man-Song celebrate passionate love and offer many personal glimpses of the young John Neihardt.Unashamedly erotic, they reveal his capacity for love at age twenty-eight.Poems like "A Vision of Woman" and "Women-Wine" show the lover's prejudices and greedy need for caresses and strong embraces. Those like "To Volney Streamer" are addressed to male friends and anticipate the theme of male bonding that runs throughout his work. Because passion takes various forms, Man-Song also include...

Coming four years after The Dawn Builder (1910), John G. Neihardt's second novel portrays the lives of Black Hills miners and of those who preyed on them. Life's Lure takes up a theme that runs throughout Neihardt's work: the consequences of an inordinate desire for wealth.

The protagonists come in sets of three. On one hand there are Samuel Drake, a hapless thirty-year-old who has just squandered his inheritance in a Deadwood card game; his fickle wife Joy; and Louis Devlin, a smooth-talking, fast-fingered gentleman gambler. Devlin is not above talking about philosophy; he...