July 8, 1959

Come again with me to a forgotten corner of cultural history, but not an unworthy cranny.

Lowry C. Wimberly was born in Louisiana, in 1890 . He went to school at the University of Nebraska, and then taught there, receiving his PhD in 1925, and a full professorship at his alma mater in 1928. Wimberly was a prolific writer publishing regularly in national magazines such as Harper's, The American Mercury, Atlantic Monthly and the Saturday Review of Literature. He may be first remembered himself for a scholarly journal he ran for many decades: The Prairie Schooner, which during his editorship was a national cultural fixture. The contributors he collected include Loren Eiseley, Eudora Welty, August Derleth.

According to an appreciation of Wimberly, in a University of Nebraska publication, from whence all our information comes, Wimberley disliked modern science. His attitude was:

Take away religion, folklore, the myths--take away philosophy, literature, music and you have nothing...Wimberly's mistrust echoed that of the German sociologist Max Weber who foresaw in 1905 that rational disenchantment, economic compulsion, and shallow moralism would create a culture of vain self-congratulation. Weber summed this up in a famous phrase: "Specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart; this nullity imagines that it has obtained a level of civilization never before achieved." Wimberly fought that nullity with all his cunning.

Here is a photo of our subject:

That is Wimberly in 1946. He had married May (nee Boynton) in 1910, and here is the house in which they raised 4 children:

Wimberly had written his dissertation on the lore of death and burial in English and Scottish ballads. He collected folklore mentioning cats, too, such as Dick Whittington's cat, and the Earl of Cattenborough. In 1938 he published a collection called: The Famous Cats of Fairyland. Lowry C. Wimberly died on July 8, 1959.