Farmer Poet James Schell Hearst: Iowa Time Machine August 8, 1900

Iowa Time Machine ⏰: On August 8, 1900, James (Jim) Schell Hearst was born on Maplehearst Farm west of Cedar Falls, beginning a life that would turn the everyday work and weather of Iowa agriculture into poetry read across the nation. Farmer, paraplegic, teacher, and poet, Hearst used more than six hundred poems and a shelf of prose and memoir to show that the rhythms of Midwestern farm life could carry literary weight and bring distinction to both himself and his home community.

Hearst attended a country school four miles west of Cedar Falls and then studied at the Training School of Iowa State Teachers College (now UNI). He briefly enlisted in the US Army in 1918 near the end of World War I before returning to Cedar Falls. In 1919, at age nineteen, he dove into the Cedar River on Memorial Day, struck his head, fractured his spine, and lived the remaining sixty‑four years as a person with paraplegia, recovering movement in his arms after intensive physiotherapy in Iowa City under the care of physicians, including orthopedic surgeon Arthur Steindler.

Restricted in mobility but determined to remain on the land, Hearst worked the five‑hundred‑acre Maplehearst Farm with his brother Charles, attending Rotary meetings and social events with “Chuck” as his constant companion. He designed his own course of study by reading widely, country by country, drew on winter “idle time” as a farmer to write, and in his mid‑twenties began publishing articles in Wallace’s Farmer, which encouraged him to continue as a writer speaking from the perspective of a Midwestern farmer.

Over his lifetime, he published more than six hundred poems, twelve or thirteen volumes of poetry depending on how one counts revised editions of Country Men, several prose works, and at least two autobiographical books, including My Shadow Below Me. His poems appeared in hundreds of periodicals, among them the New York Times, Saturday Evening Post, and Ladies’ Home Journal, and he often insisted that his manuscripts remain with Midwestern publishers, even when friends like Robert Frost offered to carry his work to New York. Beginning in 1941, Hearst taught creative writing at Iowa State Teachers College, with students coming to his home for class. From 1953 onward, he and his wife, Meryl, hosted classes and visiting writers at their house on West Seerley Boulevard. #Iowa #OTD #History #Literature #Poet