Mari Sandoz

Background

She was born Mary Susette Sandoz, on May 11, 1896 in Sheridan County, Nebraska, United States, the daughter of Jules Ami Sandoz, a rancher and horticulturist, and Mary Elizabeth Fehr, both Swiss immigrants. Her father, the most important influence on her life, was a champion of small farmers, but he was also an egomaniac and a domestic tyrant whose intellectual gifts and social achievements were marred by an almost constant round of lawsuits against his neighbors and violent rages against his wife and children. All her life one of Sandoz's hands was partially crippled because her enraged father had broken a bone in it.

Her entire early life was dangerous even by frontier standards; sent out at the age of twelve to bring in the cattle during a blizzard, Sandoz suffered an attack of snow blindness and never recovered her sight in one eye.

Education

Sandoz received only four and one-half years of often interrupted formal schooling. After 1922 she attended the University of Nebraska as a special student, without taking a degree.

Career

Her career as an artist and scholar was a struggle for which her childhood deprivation and suffering had prepared her. In 1913 Sandoz passed a qualifying examination for rural teachers.

For several years she taught in rural schools in western Nebraska, and periodically. During these years she worked in a drug laboratory, as a proofreader, as an assistant in the university's English department, and as a researcher for the Nebraska State Historical Society.

Her father told her that he considered artists and writers "the maggots of society, " but before his death in 1928 he asked her to write his biography. She had planned to do so for many years, but such was his power over her that she had feared to begin until he suggested it. It took Sandoz seven years to write Old Jules (1935), which was rejected by fourteen publishers before it was awarded. Written first as a novel, it eventually became an almost anomalous work: too thoroughly researched and grounded in historical actuality to be considered a novel, but too dramatic and even too lurid to be only a work of history.

Old Jules was the first in a series of works that Sandoz had planned early in her life, the Trans-Missouri Series, which recounts the history of the Great Plains from the Stone Age to modern times. Other books in this series are Crazy Horse (1942), Cheyenne Autumn (1953), The Buffalo Hunters (1954), The Cattlemen (1958), and The Beaver Men (1964). (A seventh work was to have dealt with the history of the petroleum industry. )

In 1943 she moved to New York City to be near research libraries and publishing houses, and she spent the rest of her life there except for research trips to the West and summers from 1947 to 1955, teaching fiction writing at the University of Wisconsin. Her life in New York City was almost monastic in its devotion to research and writing.

During World War II she attempted to enlist in the Women's Army Corps. Her social conscience probably kept her from critical success as a novelist because reviewers considered much of her fiction moralistic in tone. Two early novels, Slogum House (1937) and Capital City (1939), reflect her apprehension about native American fascism.

But she also wrote two highly regarded short novels on Indian themes, The Horsecatcher (1956) and The Story Catcher (1962). The best, and least allegorical, of her other novels, Miss Morissa (1955), concerns a woman doctor on the frontier but rises above its social messages.

Sandoz struggled with cancer in her last years. Working to complete her last book, The Battle of the Little Big Horn (1966), she spent her final days virtually alone, with the courage and stoicism. She died in New York City.

Achievements

• Although a minor novelist, Sandoz is certainly a major writer. Her Old Jules, Crazy Horse, and Cheyenne Autumn are widely read even today. She became one of the West's foremost writers, and wrote extensively about pioneer life and the Plains Indians. And in Old Jules, the beauty of which is heightened by almost unbearable flashes of terror, she produced a great work of American literature. Her other famous works include The Tom-Walker (1947), Winter Thunder (1951), Hostiles and Friendlies (1959), Love Song to the Plains (1961), and Sandhills Sundays and Other Recollections (1970) and others. She was awarded the Atlantic Monthly Prize for nonfiction. In 1969 the Mari Sandoz Award is established by the Nebraska Library Association. In 1975 she was inducted into the Nebraska Hall of Fame. A bust of Sandoz stands in the Nebraska State Capital Building in Lincoln.

Works

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  • Crazy Horse: The Strange Man of the Oglalas

    ( Crazy Horse, the legendary military leader of the Oglal...)

  • The Cattlemen: From the Rio Grande across the Far Marias

    ("This thundering book by the author of Old Jules is the s...)

  • Sandhill Sundays and Other Recollections

    ( "No one in our time wrote better than the late Mari San...)

  • Cheyenne Autumn

    ( In the autumn of 1878 a band of Cheyenne Indians set ou...)

  • The Buffalo Hunters: The Story of the Hide Men, Second Edition

    ( In 1867 conservative estimates put the number of buffal...)

  • Old Jules

    ( First published in 1935, Old Jules is unquestionably Ma...)

  • The Battle of the Little Bighorn

    (Western American History. Mari Sandoz's account of the ba...)

Views

Sandoz fought for the integrity of her literary style, a kind of rough prose that, she believed, was too raw and real for the taste of provincial eastern editors and publishers unfamiliar with western reality.

Personality

Sandoz had a deep and lifelong sense of social responsibility. She always helped young writers.

Interests

• Writers

  Joseph Conrad

Connections

On May 27, 1914, she married Wray Macumber; she divorced him in 1919.

Father:

Jules Ami Sandoz

Mother:

Mary Elizabeth Fehr

Spouse:

Wray Macumber

References

• Mari Sandoz: Story Catcher of the Plains