Early in 1908, 24-year-old Mona Martinsen, having just returned to New York after three years of studying sculpture with Auguste Rodin in Paris, wrote a letter to a 27-year-old Nebraskan, a newly published author and poet, by the name of John G. Neihardt. She had read the passionate and lustful poems he had recently published in a book called A Bundle of Myrrh, his first published collection of poetry, and she wanted him to know she liked them.
Neihardt had received letters from other young women after his poems were published, but something about Martinsen’s letter touched him, and he responded. This led to a fevered correspondence between the two young people. Martinsen later told a newspaper reporter, “We found we thought and felt alike.”
By the end of that summer, Neihardt, in one of his letters, had proposed marriage, and Mona, in one of hers, had accepted. On Saturday, November 28, 1908, the two finally met when her train arrived at Omaha’s Union Station. Neihardt was there with a marriage license in his pocket, and they were married the next day.
Neihardt trusted Mona’s judgment as he trusted no one else’s about his poetry and prose, about the very subjects that he tackled. It was Mona who convinced him to jettison his idea of writing a book-length poem about the French Revolution to focus instead on an old fur trapper named Hugh Glass. This led to his Song of Hugh Glass, the first of five long narrative poems eventually published as The Cycle of the West.
Neihardt called their relationship “an untroubled comradeship,” saying she was his “ideal hearer.” Throughout his writing career he read to her from whatever he was working on. “[I]f the light came into her face, I knew,” he told a friend.
In 1958 John and Mona Neihardt were beginning to think about a fiftieth wedding anniversary celebration. That April, they drove through downtown Columbia, Missouri, where they were living, John behind the wheel. Going around a double-parked truck, the Neihardts’ car collided head-on with another car. Mona hit her head on the frame of the windshield and, despite her protests, was taken to the hospital, treated for minor injuries, and released. Neihardt was charged with careless and imprudent driving and causing an accident. Over the next two weeks a bump appeared on Mona’s head, and she was returned to the hospital. On April 17, she died from her injuries.
Mona’s funeral was on a Sunday afternoon, and the following Tuesday, Neihardt returned to the classes he was teaching at the University of Missouri, telling his students he had lost his best friend. “I’ve handled my classes with a curious new feel of power,” he said at the time, by imagining Mona sitting among his students, looking up toward him at the front of the classroom “with a shining face.”
-By Timothy G. Anderson, John G. Neihardt Center
*Timothy G. Anderson is the author of Lonesome Dreamer: The Life of John G. Neihardt (Bison Books, 2016).
