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About the Author . . .

SANDOZ, MARI (May 11, 1896-March 10, 1966), American historian and novelist, wrote: "I was born at what was then Sandoz post office, Sheridan County, Nebraska, the eldest of six children of Jules A. Sandoz of Neuchatel, Switzerland, and Mary Elizabeth (Fehr) Sandoz of Schaffhausen, Switzerland. I grew up on the architectural scheme of the cowboy--height five feet and a half inch weight 105 pounds. Also weather-beaten. In the home of 'Old Jules' Sandoz, trapper, locater, horticulturist, and community builder, I grew up speaking German, hearing French, Polish, and Czech, and English, which I learned after I started to school, at nine. I went to rural school four and a half years, took the rural teachers' examination, taught five years in western Nebraska, and attended the University of Nebraska three and one half years, working in a drug laboratory and as English assistant at the university to pay my way.

"I began writing stories as soon as I learned to put letters together. Had several of these published in the junior page of the Omaha Daily News. Perhaps my earliest literary influences were Joseph Conrad, whose sea seemed to me so like the sandhills about me, and Hardy, whose recognition of chance and circumstance in the shaping of human destiny seemed very true to the fairly violent life about me. Later I discovered the work of Shakespeare, of the Russians, and finally the Greeks. Aristophanes and portions of the Old Testament are my favorite material for re-reading.

"In college I wrote seventy-eight short stories, won honorable mention in a Harper's contest in 1926, and wrote a bad novel that, fortunately, no one would publish. When a publisher returned Old Jules with a curt rejection letter in 1933, I quit. Starved out, my confidence in even my critical faculties gone, I gave up writing permanently. But in less than a month I was writing a novel that I had been thinking about doing for nine or ten years. It was Slogum House.

"By the time the rough draft was done, I was offered work at the State Historical Society, in Lincoln, as associate editor of the Nebraska History Magazine. I made a new copy of Old Jules and started it on its alphabetical rounds of the publishers again. On its fourteenth trip out it was accepted--and won the Atlantic non-fiction prize in 1935.

"I never begin to write even a two-page article--let alone a story or a book--without making first a simple, declarative statement of the theme, to be tacked up before my eyes for the duration of the work. Then I go through my notes of pertinent material and begin making drafts, with almost endless revisions.

"I always come back to the Middle West. There's a vigor here, and a broadness of horizon. Besides, I believe that the creative worker must not wander too far from the earth of his emotional identity. I, at least, am Anteus-footed. "Politically, I suppose that I am what might be called an independent liberal, as the Sandoz family seems to have been for seven hundred years.

"Now I am working on my two Indian biographies that have taken up some of my time and much of my thought for five or six years--a Cheyenne biography and one of a Sioux. These will require five or six more years for completion, I anticipate.

"Since 1942 I have published several books and added to my shorter publications, which had varied from North American Review to Ladies' Home Journal.

"Since my college days I have worked with students of writing courses, later on the staff of writers' conferences, and, from 1947 on, I have conducted the advanced short story and novel writing courses in the eight-weeks' Writers' Institute at the University of Wisconsin in their summer sessions. In 1950 the University of Nebraska gave me an honorary Doctor of Literature. I am a member of the Authors Guild of the Authors League of America; the Association on American Indian Affairs, and on the board of associate editors of their The American Indian; the New York Posse of The Westerners, etc."

In the introduction to her biography, Mari Sandoz: Story Catcher of the Plains, Helen Winter Stauffer states that not only was her subject recognized as a novelist, historian, and biographer, but also as an authority on the Native Americans of the Great Plains. Stauffer continues that "her work varies in quality, her novels usually considered least successful, and her histories, particularly her biographies, most trenchant. In the latter she fused her skill as a writer, her mastery of historical research, and her empathy for her subjects to create works of unique and lasting value."

Old Jules, published as a book in 1935, was the first in Sandoz's Great Plains or Trans-Missouri series. It is a portrait of her father, a rough and tumble pioneer described by William Allen White, in the Atlantic Book Shelf, as a "strong, unwashed, passionate, contentious, domineering, amorous old male." It is also the story of a way of life, suggested the Yale Review: "Throughout the turmoil of Old Jules's life may be heard the deeper murmur of the nation's battle with the frontier.. . .In brief, the march of civilization westward is the ground-tone of the book." Reviewers praised Sandoz for her realistic portrait of the frontier and the harsh realities of life there, as well as her descriptions of its wild beauty. The reviewer claimed that "surely never, save perhaps in the novels of Miss Willa Cather, has the sinister enchantress, the frontier, seemed so real as in this narrative of the Swiss frontiersman Old Jules," although this is a minority view.

Sandoz continued her series with Crazy Horse, a biography of the Oglala Sioux chieftain, and Cheyenne Autumn, an account of the infamous mistreatment of the Cheyenne people. "While other writers had stressed the Indian point of view, the language of the white author almost always interfered with the atmosphere of the Indian culture portrayed in the story," her biographer M. W. Stauffer wrote. "It is by means of her particular use of language in her Indian books that Mari Sandoz brings the reader to greater understanding and perhaps even identification with her Indian heroes." The Buffalo Hunters, The Cattlemen, and The Beaver Men shift the chronicle to those who took from the land. The Battle of the Little Big Horn was published posthumously.

Sandoz's nonfiction, is more important than her fiction, but her novel Slogum House, an epic tale of the Nebraska frontier and one woman's overwhelming ambition and greed, almost equals it. Stauffer suggests in her biography that Sandoz "intended it to be an allegorical study of a domineering nation using force to overcome opposition.. . .She wanted to demonstrate the evil of greed, to her the worst of sins, and to study other effects of megalomania, which fascinated her during the years of the great dictators, Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin."

In 1943 Sandoz moved to New York City to be near her publishers, as well as the museums and archives of the East. Archival material is held by the Mari Sandoz Collection at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln; the Mari Sandoz Corporation, Gordon, Nebraska; and the Mamie Meredith Collection at the Nebraska State Historical Society.

Suggested Reading: Atlantic Book Shelf November 1935; New York Herald Tribune Books November 28, 1937; New York Times March 11, 1966; New York Times Book Review July 3, 1966; Yale Review December 1935. Contemporary Literary Criticism Vol. 28, 1984; Dictionary of American Biography, Suppl. 8, Faulkner, V. (ed.) Roundup: A Nebraska Reader, 1957; Greenwell, S. L. Descriptive Guide to the Mari Sandoz Collection, 1980; Notable American Women: The Modern Period, 1980; Pifer, C. S. Gordon Journal Letters of Mari Sandoz, 1992; Pifer, C. S. The Making of an Author: From the Mementoes of Mari Sandoz, 1972; Something About the Author Vol. 5, 1973; Stauffer, H. W. (ed.) Letters of Mari Sandoz, 1992; Stauffer, H. W. Mari Sandoz, 1984; Stauffer, H. W. Mari Sandoz: Story Catcher of the Plains, 1982; Villiger, L. R. Mari Sandoz: A Study in Post-Colonial Discourse, 1994.

Selected Works: Nonfiction--Old Jules, 1935; Crazy Horse: The Strange Man of the Oglalas, 1942; Cheyenne Autumn, 1953; The Buffalo Hunters: The Story of the Hide Men, 1954; The Cattlemen from the Rio Grande Across the Far Marias, 1958; Hostiles and Friendlies: Selected Short Writings, 1959; Love Song to the Plains, 1961; These Were the Sioux, 1961; The Beaver Men: Spearheads of Empire, 1964; Old Jules Country: A Selection from Old Jules and Thirty Years of Writing Since the Book Was Published, 1965; The Battle of the Little Big Horn, 1966; The Christmas of the Phonograph Records: A Recollection, 1966; Sandhill Sundays and Other Recollections, 1970. Novels--Slogum House, 1937; Capital City, 1939; The Tom-Walker, 1947; Winter Thunder, 1954; Miss Morissa: Doctor of the Gold Trail, 1955; The Horsecatcher, 1957; Son of the Gamblin' Man: The Youth of an Artist, 1960; The Story Catcher, 1963; Foal of Heaven, 1993. Short stories--Victorie and Other Stories, 1986.