Frederick Feikema Manfred was born on January 6, 1912 in Doon, Iowa, United States. Son of Feike Feikes Vi and Aaltje (Van Engen) Feikema. The gently rolling slopes and wide horizons of the northwest Iowa plains created a landscape that permeated his writing and a place he immortalized as Siouxland.
Strongly influenced by his Frisian/Saxon ancestry and the Calvinist theology of his parents’ Christian Reformed Church, Frederick Manfred graduated from Calvin College (now Calvin University) in Grand Rapids, Michigan, in 1934. He also studied at Nettleton Commercial College, Sioux Falls, South Dakota in 1937 and was a correspondent student at the University of Minnesota in 1941-1942.
In a remarkable outpouring of industry and creativity, Frederick Manfred published seven novels between 1944 and 1951. Most of them contain autobiographical elements; internal monologues for which he coined the word "rumes," which he transferred to his characters and their situations; and the rural midwestern settings that give his novels a convincing if often stark and oppressive power and an earthy directness that sometimes shocked his readers.
By 1947, when his third novel, This Is the Year, introduced its tragically stubborn farmer-hero to readers, Feikema had progressed from the Webb Publishing Company of St. Paul, Minnesota, to the more prestigious New York firm of Doubleday and Company. His eighth and most successful novel, Lord Grizzly (1954), was the first of his Buckskin Man stories, atavistic westerns that celebrate male strength and rugged self-reliance. It became a national bestseller. Frederick Manfred retells the true story of Hugh Glass, a hunter and tracker attacked by a grizzly bear in 1823 on the bluffs of the Missouri River. Desperately wounded, abandoned by his companions, he literally crawls back to life, energized by the desire for revenge. Manfred’s survival saga told in three carefully staged parts, describes Glass’s wrestle with the bear, his agonizing crawl back to strength and civilization, and his showdown with his former friends.
Between 1957 and 1966 Frederick Manfred published four more Buckskin Man novels: Riders of Judgment, Conquering Horse, Scarlet Plume, and King of Spades. His World’s Wanderer "rumes," initially published individually between 1941 and 1951, were revised and published in an omnibus volume as Wanderlust in 1962. Altogether he published 23 novels as well as collections of poems, essays, and letters. Despite this admirable record, he never recreated the prominence achieved by the publication of Lord Grizzly, although critics count The Chokecherry Tree and Green Earth among his finest work.
Frederick Manfred died on September 7, 1994, 50 years after the publication of his first novel, having made his home in his immortalized Siouxland almost all of his 82 years.
Frederick Feikema Manfred recipient $1000 fiction grant-in-aid American Academy of Arts and Letters, 1945, the University of Minnesota Rockefeller Foundation Regional Writing fellowship (1944-1946), Field Foundation fellowship (1948-1949), Andreas Foundation fellowships (1949, 1952), McKnight Foundation fellow (1958-1959), Huntington Hartford Foundation fellow (1963-1964), Avon Foundation fellow (1958-1959), Recipient Mark Twain Literature award (1981).
(The story of three generations of the Tunis Freyling fami...)
1992(Young Earl Ransom is found on the Cheyenne prairie with n...)
1965(Carla Simmons, a golden blooming young girl, is torn betw...)
1989(Riders of Judgment is the fifth book chronologically in F...)
1957Frederick Manfred was a member of Poets, Playwrights, Editors, Essayists and Novelists association, Author's League American, Society Midland Writers (vice president), Players Club (New York City).
Frederick Manfred married Maryanna Shorba, October 31, 1942 (divorced October 1978). Children: Freya, Marya, Frederick Feikema.
Freya Manfred (born November 28, 1944, in Minneapolis, Minnesota) is a modern American poet. She is the oldest child of American novelist Frederick Manfred and Maryanna Shorba Manfred. Her younger siblings are Marya Manfred and Frederick Manfred Junior.
