Shephard, Esther

Organizational History

In 1857 the San Francisco Board of Education established Minns' Evening Normal School for current and prospective teachers in the city. Named after its principal, George W. Minns, the institution was formally established as the first California State Normal School by the State Legislature in 1862. A decade later, the Legislature voted to move the Normal School to San José, and the school relocated to its new home on Washington Square prior to the fall term of 1872. After a fire destroyed the Normal School building in 1880, the Legislature authorized $200,000 to construct a new building on the same site. Completed in 1881, the building was commonly referred to as the Second State Normal School. After several names and curriculum changes, Minns' Normal School is now San José State University, offering more than 134 bachelor's and master's degrees with 110 concentrations, and is recognized as one of the top public universities granting such degrees in the West.

Esther Shephard, author, professor of literature, and literary critic, was born Esther Maria Lofstrand in 1891. She began her career as a high school teacher in Belgrade, Montana. However, only a short time later, after the loss of her first husband, Richard T. Shepherd, she moved and enrolled at the University of Washington where she earned her B.A. in 1920, followed by an M.A. in 1921 and a Ph.D. in 1938. In 1921, Esther married C. Ellis Shephard and in the same year her master's thesis, Frontier Literature, was published. A subsequent collection of West Coast logging camp stories, retold by Shephard in Paul Bunyan, was self-published in 1924 and republished in 1941 with illustrations by Rockwell Kent. Starting in the early 1930s, Shephard shifted her focus from composing poems to playwriting and the literary criticism of Walt Whitman's work, the latter of which culminated in her Ph.D. dissertation, Walt Whitman's Pose, published in 1938. In 1939, Shephard obtained her most important academic appointment at the English Department of San José State University, where she taught for the next twenty years. During that time her most significant achievement was the retelling of the ancient Chinese legend, The Cowherd and the Sky Maiden, which was published in 1950 and staged as an opera at the University of Washington in 1952. Her primary focus remained on Walt Whitman, and resulted in the publication of several papers about Whitman's works during her years at the university. She died in 1975 at the age of eighty-four.

From the guide to the Esther Shephard Papers, 1925-1975, 1945-1968, (San José State University. Library.)