Mari Sandoz
THE NOTED WESTERN HISTORIAN , novelist, biographer, lecturer
and teacher, Mari Sandoz (Marie Susette Sandoz, 1896–1966)
was the oldest child of Jules and Mary Fehr Sandoz, Swiss immigrants
and homesteaders in the Niobrara River region of northwestern Nebraska.
She grew up in a turbulent, impoverished household, dominated
by her father's violent temper. When Mari was fourteen, the family
moved to the sandhills, twenty-five miles southeast of the Niobrara.
The area was treeless, stark, monotonous, and mysterious; the
hills both fascinated and frightened Mari.
After graduating from the eighth grade, Mari taught in nearby
country schools. She did not attend high school. At eighteen,
she married a neighboring rancher, Wray Macumber, and continued
to teach intermittently during the next five years. In 1919,
Mari divorced her husband and left the sandhills for Lincoln,
450 miles across the state. For the next sixteen years she taught
school, held a variety of jobs, managed to get admitted to the
University of Nebraska despite the lack of high school credits,
and wrote constantly, although with almost no success. During
those years, she claimed, she received over a thousand rejection slips for her
short stories.
In 1935 Sandoz's biography of her
father, Old Jules, won the Atlantic NonFiction
Prize of $5000. From then on her life was dedicated to writing
and research. In 1940 she moved from Lincoln to Denver for better
research facilities, and also because of hostility in Lincoln,
brought on by publication of her Capital City, which depicts
the political machinations in a midwestern state capital. Lincoln
residents refused to believe Sandoz's denial that her fictional
capital city was based on Lincoln.
In 1943, after the publication of Crazy Horse, Sandoz
moved to New York. She wanted to use the great western research
collections in the East, and she needed to be near her eastern
editors and publishers in order to work successfully with them.
She always claimed to hate New York and was often in the West,
lecturing, promoting her books, or researching.
Mari Sandoz died of cancer in 1966, in New York. She was buried
according to her wishes on a hill overlooking the Sandoz ranch
in the sandhills of Nebraska.
Because most of Sandoz's serious writing is nonfiction, critics
have sometimes overlooked her literary achievements. But though
her major work, the six-volume Great Plains Series, together
with other studies of the Great Plains and its inhabitants, is
classified as history or biography, Sandoz's initial intention
was to succeed as a fiction writer. That the material from which
she drew her sources was historical was to some extent happenstance.
She realized that to be successful, she must have close emotional
ties with her subjects; those subjects were to be found in the
trans-Missouri region, the Nebraska frontier, the sandhills in
which she grew up, and Lincoln, where she moved in her early
twenties. The people who lived there and the events that took
place there held her attention all during her writing career.
Sandoz had formed her theories and opinions, her world view,
by the time her first book, Old Jules, was published in
1935, and she held to those views consistently throughout her
life. She felt she had a mission to elucidate her region to the
world. Her apprentice work, written during the years of struggle
to learn control of her material and to gain recognition, was
based on actual events and the setting was her native Nebraska.
Old Jules, the biography of Sandoz's father, had been
years in the writing. It certainly fulfilled her requirement
that the subject matter be associated with her emotions, for
Jules Sandoz, the subject, was the most important man in her
life. An egotistical, eccentric, sometimes brutal man with an
explosive temper, he dominated his wife and children not only
during his lifetime, but for years afterward. Mari feared her
father, but she admired him also, for she knew that he was an
important figure in the frontier community he helped to develop.
Jules's life story is inextricably involved with that of the
Nebraska frontier, one of the last in the United States. Realizing
this fact, the author limned the strengths and weaknesses of
the man and portrayed the biography of the community as well.
The book is successful because she was able to depict a believable–though
hardly likeable–man in relation to both family and community
background.
Old Jules is so unique it has few imitators. The author's
ability to fuse Jules's importance to his region with scenes
from his domestic life, which involved Sandoz herself, is rare.
In 1935 Old Jules shocked many readers, not only because
of the domestic scenes but because it showed the public a rough,
unglamorous picture of the frontier. The strong language, the
sometimes fierce realism, the frankness, were all criticized
vigorously, but they make the book powerful. The swearing no
longer shocks the contemporary reader, but the realism and frankness
are as gripping now as they were then.
That Sandoz's first book varies so slightly in sentence structure,
style, organization, and purpose, from her last, published thirty-two
years later, is not so remarkable when one realizes that she
had been writing seriously for over thirteen years before Old
Jules was published, and had worked over seven years on this
book alone. Sandoz, although familiar with the frontier
and living through many of the episodes herself,
researched the background material at length, through newspapers,
journals, diaries, publications, and interviews. Jules himself
despised authors, and during his lifetime she had not questioned
him directly on his activities; nevertheless, he had often talked
to her of his experiences.
After his death in 1928, she began in earnest to write the story
of his life. But eastern publishers were not eager for the book.
It was sent to thirteen publishers, rejected and completely rewritten
thirteen times before it won the Atlantic NonFiction Contest.
It was also one of the selections for the Book-of-the-Month Club
that year.
The prizewinning version was given serious attention by prominent
reviewers. While some were startled, almost without exception
they were excited by this new talent and her unusual book with
its almost unheard-of locale and strange protagonist. The author's
persistence and faith in herself and her subject matter had paid
off.
Why a book so well regarded (and to this day selling well) took
so long to be published is made clear when one remembers the
thirteen revisions. While most of the early manuscripts no longer
exist, those who read them emphasize that the later version is
much more mature, less vindictive, and written in better style.
One of the most remarkable aspects, the aesthetic distance achieved
by the author who is, after all, daughter of the protagonist
and who figures in several episodes, could have come only through
successive rewritings. As John Cawelti points out in The Six-Gun
Mystique:
Certain unresolved impulses–particularly those growing out
of the relations between parents and children in the course of
the child's psychological development–are so imperative
that if he fails to resolve them in childhood, an individual
is doomed to constantly reexperience these impulses and psychic
conflict they generate through various analogies and disguises.
. . . In addition, this conflict is likely to shape the kind
of art he creates and enjoys.
While Sandoz's early work stemming
from her own life is charged with too much personal emotion,
too much sympathy for her characters, her many reworkings of
Old Jules to some extent exorcized a too-close tie to
her past. The many reworkings were difficult for her, but undoubtedly
necessary, for this book and for future writing as well.
A major problem in evaluating the book is its genre. Sandoz identified
some of her earlier versions as fiction. She considered the final
one nonfiction, and Atlantic Press obviously did also, as did
most reviewers, but it reads as if it were fiction. The narrative
skills she had developed during her long years of writing are
used successfully here, but the result confuses those
who believe nonfiction should use exposition
rather than a storytelling approach. The author employs suspense,
carefully regulated rising and falling action, direct dialogue,
narrative description–what one expects to find in good fiction.
Despite an occasional distressed reviewer, however, the reading
public liked it. Her combining of meticulous research and narrative
mode succeeded so well here that it set the pattern for most
of her nonfiction.
Sandoz's skill as a conscious artist is clear
when one examines Old Jules, even superficially. On the
first page she introduces the time, the place, the protagonist,
and suggests the conflict between the man and the land. The importance
of the physical world to the characters and movement of the story
is established in the first few paragraphs:
The border towns . . . were shaking off the dullness of winter. . . . But west
of there the monotonous yellow sandhills unobtrusively soaked
up the soggy patches of April snow. Fringes of yellow-green crept
down the south slopes or ran brilliant emerald over the long,
blackened strips left by the late prairie fires. . . . All winter
the wind had torn at the fire-bared knolls, shifting but not
changing the unalterable sameness of the hills that spread in
rolling swells westward to the hard-land country of the upper
Niobrara River, where deer and antelope grazed almost undisturbed
except by an occasional hunter. . . . And out of the East came
a lone man in an open wagon, driving hard.
This emphasis on the
land, humans' effect on it, and its effect on humans, was her
major theme throughout her life.
The shape of the book is loose, "beads on a string" as Sandoz
describes it, as it follows Jules's life, but there is a deliberate
structural line. The book begins in medias res, not with
Jules's birth, his life in Switzerland, or even his arrival in
the United States, but with his coming into the Niobrara region,
some years later. The story begins with a young man making a
new beginning, in the spring of the year. It ends when Jules's
life ends, in the autumn. And although Jules has done much to
change the country during his long life, actively bringing in
settlers, battling cattlemen, developing adaptable crops, and
planting orchards, the description of the sandhills on the last
page recalls that at the beginning:
Outside the late fall wind swept over the hard-land
country of the upper Running Water, tearing at the low sandy
knolls that were the knees of the hills, shifting, but not changing,
the unalterable sameness of the somnolent land spreading away
toward the East.
While one of the most remarkable features of Old Jules is
the fine sense of detachment the author maintains between her
protagonist and herself,
conversely, one of the most successful aspects
of her Indian biographies, Crazy Horse (1942) and Cheyenne
Autumn (1953), is her intimate relationship with the Indian
community. The closeness the reader feels toward the Indians
is achieved through the author's use of language and point of
view. The story is told as if by an Indian–someone knowledgeable
about their culture, their ideals, their religion and customs.
Furthermore, the reader knows only what the Indians know about
their situation and can therefore share their emotions as they
experience them. His sympathy is with the Indians in conflicts
between Indians and whites.
The sense of authenticity pervading the books comes through Sandoz's
language. She uses only figures of speech compatible with the
Indians' references and way of life. As she says in her preface
to Crazy Horse, "I have used the simplest words possible,
hoping by idiom and figures and the underlying rhythm pattern
to say some of the things of the Indian for which there are no
white-man words, suggest something of his innate nature, something
of his relationship to the earth and the sky and all that is
between."
The Indian concept of his physical world is found throughout
her books, in which the natural elements seem to be active: "the
black shadow of a canyon that humped itself against the western
moon . . . as the first sun climbed into the sky, it dried up
the little clouds that had slept in the west
. . . a steep hill lifted itself against the winds to come .
. . a scattering of box elders standing in their fallen leaves
. . . lower hills made a wall all around. . . the clouds now
seeming to walk on the far hills. . . ."
On the literary level, both books are consciously and carefully crafted.
Both are also important as historical writing; Sandoz once again
was indefatigable in her research. She had privileged and unusual
information and she used it with integrity.
Crazy Horse, the Oglala Sioux war chief who fought successfully
against both General Crook and General Custer before his betrayal
and death at Fort Robinson, Nebraska, in 1877, attracted Sandoz
as a hero more than any other she wrote of. She had heard of
him and his tragic fate first from her father's cronies, who
used to stop and swap stories with him when the family lived
on the Niobrara River. Mari as a small girl sat up in the wood
box by the kitchen stove long after bedtime to hear these story
tellers. When she learned that Crazy Horse had roamed nearby,
probably had been in the very place where she now lived, she
was even more interested in him. Sandoz, before she wrote anything,
always literally placed herself in the scene. She could then
remove herself in her imagination, but that first step as active
observer was always necessary for her. In envisioning Crazy Horse
as a youngster and young man existing on this very land, she
formed a close sympathy for him. Her intensive research only
strengthened that sympathy. While her respect for the two Cheyenne
chiefs Dull Knife and Little Wolf and their band is clear in
Cheyenne Autumn, Crazy Horse was her greatest
hero. Many consider Crazy Horse her finest work.
In both books the structure is
close to that of the traditional classic epic. Crazy Horse
begins with the death of the Indians' peace chief, Conquering
Bear, and ends with the death of Crazy Horse himself. All events
in the book point to that death. The last chapter, "A Red
Blanket from His Own," is especially foreboding and filled with
symbols suggesting his doom.
In Cheyenne Autumn the author's usual circular structure
(the end im
The remaining three books of her Great Plains Series, The
Buffalo Hunters (1954), The Cattlemen (1958), and
The Beaver Men (1964) each develop the history of the
West in relation to an animal species. The lack of a major human
protagonist and the great amount of detail make these books somewhat
disjointed and present a challenge to the reader's memory as
events and characters move rapidly across the pages. While these
three don't hold one's sustained interest as do the biographies,
the author's tales about such well-known characters as Buffalo
Bill, Wild Bill Hickok, Calamity Jane, General Sheridan, and
General Custer, and her ability to bring lesser-known characters
to life, make them entertaining. Her use of anecdotes and vignettes,
told with her pithy, colloquial western expressions, indicate
her belief in the spoken word as it was used by the old story
tellers of her youth, a factor in her ability to recreate scenes
of visual accuracy or great dramatic action. Although her major
purpose was to make her audience aware of the historical and
economic importance of the West, she also wanted to draw attention
to the tall-tale quality of life in her region and to give readers
a sense of healthy skepticism for received, written history.
Strongly affected by her sense of history when she worked with
protagonists whom she could identify with her own regions, she
wrote powerful and effective works, recreating the people and
their world as it must have been, rebuilding lost cultures of
the past, emphasizing the moral issues involved when one culture
destroys another, whether human or animal, and illustrating her own romantic view that the
individual has dignity and worth.
Despite the success of Old Jules and her later nonfiction,
Sandoz for years adhered to her determination to be recognized
for her fictional achievements, rather than her work in history
or biography. Slogum House (1937) had been taking shape
even before Old Jules was published. In this, the only
novel based in her native Niobrara region, the setting is a mythical
bend in the Niobrara River and encompasses two mythical counties
nearby. Gulla, a domineering, villainous woman, as ugly as her
name implies, gains land and power by prostituting her own daughters
and using her sons as gunslingers. Slogum House succeeds
in depicting an individual whose will to power overwhelms the
good characters because of their weakness or ineffectuality. It is somber and powerful and depressing.
It was also intended by the author
as an allegory of a will-to-power nation greedy for world domination.
She had read Hitler's Mein Kampf and feared him and his
purpose. Hardly anyone recognized the story as allegory, because
the characters were well developed and the action realistic.
But Sandoz believed a serious writer had a duty to express his
world view and should write to influence others. All her fiction
is didactic to some extent. Her later novels, Capital City
(1939) and The Tom-Walker (1947) are both frankly
aimed at correcting some of the world's ills. Capital City
was based on a study of ten midwestern state capitals, and
its characters, so Sandoz claimed, were composites representing
traits rather than attempts at human re-creations. However, people
in Lincoln, Nebraska, were sure the book was a roman à
clef, that the city described was really Lincoln, and that
the characters were indeed based on well-known figures there.
They believed Sandoz was repaying them for the poverty and slights
she experienced during her early writing days.
The author never acknowledged that any of the charges were true.
She did admit the book was an unsuccessful experiment, but it
is of interest because some predicted world events later came
true, and because of her effort to make a city the protagonist,
rather than individuals.
With the exception of her three novellas, Winter Thunder (1954),
The Horsecatcher (1957), and The Story Catcher (1963),
most of Sandoz's longer fiction was experimental. It was frequently
misunderstood and unsuccessful with readers, but is of interest
to those investigating the writer's purposes and goals.
Most critics have categorically relegated her longer fiction
to a level of lower excellence than her nonfiction. However,
the quality of her novels varies widely. Slogum House seems
the best work at present, but her experimental work may find
favor with readers in the future. Son of the Gamblin'
Man (1960), Capital City, and The Tom-Walker received
very low marks by reviewers, but Sandoz was attempting something
avantgarde with the first. Writing of the artist Robert Henri,
who lived as a boy in Cozad, Nebraska, she attempted an impressionistic
work in fiction to compare to twentiethcentury innovations in
American art such as those found in Robert Henri's
painting. Capital City is a protest novel, a type not
in much favor today.
Sandoz's use of allegory in her
fiction, utilizing the underlying symbols of the human mind,
has not yet been seriously investigated in published work, although
recently a number of graduate studies have explored that aspect.
Her nonfiction often contains allegory as well. It is less obvious,
since these books treat actual persons, but the elements are
there, stressing the author's belief in the absolute necessity
of individual development through struggle, and, particularly
in the Indian books, the loss the white civilization inflicted
upon itself because of discrimination. She approved her eminent
contemporaries Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner in their
choice of the allegorical mode to illustrate their world views.
Hemingway's Old Man and the Sea and Faulkner's A Fable
ranked, she felt, with MobyDick and Steppenwolf
among the world's great books.
Sandoz's work reflects the world view of one imbued with the
mythos of the West. As with other western writers, Sandoz's close
identification with nature and the land is evidenced throughout
her books. Listed with the rest of the characters in Old Jules,
for instance, is "The Region: The upper Niobrara country–the
hardland table, the river, and the hills." The Plains and the
cycle of nature form the unity in almost all her books.
This western world view is overlaid by the archetypal patterns
Sandoz found in ancient classical traditions of myth, epic, and
tragedy. The heroes in her nonfiction, particularly, are larger
than life and move on a vast landscape. The heroic characteristics
of Sandoz's protagonists, the sense of doom for the Indian heroes,
the classic battles of man against fate, all have ancient prototypes.
Her sense of the mythic is the means by which she presents her
historical vision.
Sandoz's understanding of myth accords with that of other western
realists as described by Max Westbrook in "Conservative,
Liberal and Western: Three Modes of American Realism" (South
Dakota Review, Summer 1966), in which he points out that
western writers are concerned with the sacred unity of life.
Since this is the major theme of the Plains Indian religion which
Sandoz so much admired, it is to be expected that she would agree.
She accepted as well the importance of the unconscious, basing
her ideas on Jung's concept that the archetypes of race memory
are inherited by all, that the unconscious, the intuitive, is
primary, and that conscious reason is unrealistic, "a bifurcation
of the human soul."
Sandoz's biographies in particular
demonstrate Westbrook's idea that for the western realist determinism
and belief in the human spirit can live side by side. Just as
in the ancient Greek stories of Phaedra, Oedipus, and Orestes,
Sandoz's heroes are defeated by forces they cannot control, but
they maintain their struggle, knowing they cannot win but continuing
because their own integrity demands it. The fates of Dull Knife,
Crazy Horse, and even to some extent Old Jules, were determined
by forces beyond their
control; nevertheless they remained formidable until the end.
Sandoz's view of life remained
remarkably consistent throughout her writing career. While she
left no written evidence of a consciously formulated philosophy,
there is consistent evidence of the themes stressed in an epic
vision: the workings of fate, the power of evil, man's inhumanity
to
man, and, paradoxically, humankind's essential nobility.
As with most western writers, Sandoz
was a "loner," a member of no group or school or movement
as such, although during her Lincoln years she knew and talked
writing with other young eager authors, an experience most exhilarating
to the young woman fresh from the isolation of the sand-hills.
She felt it true that the American writer in particular suffers
from creative isolation, for in the great periods of world literature,
in other cultures, there was a great deal of natural contact
and friction. But even during her New York years, when she was
near contemporary writers, Sandoz maintained her independence.
Her impetus came, instead, through her travels, research, and
reading. A prodigious reader, consuming on the average seven
to ten books a week, she read everything current and everything
having to do with subjects interesting to her. Few American writers
affected her directly, however. With the exception of Theodore
Dreiser and Willa Cather, she was more impressed with Europeans.
She credited two as most important to her: Joseph Conrad and
Thomas Hardy. Conrad's books she read as a child, Hardy's shortly
after coming to college. Their treatment of an individual in
his physical environment seemed similar to her own experience.
And when she began to read Greek drama and history in college
she clearly recognized the similarity between those myths and
attitudes and those of the nineteenthcentury Plains Indians.
The only western writer who affected Sandoz in a literary sense
was John G. Neihardt, whose Black Elk Speaks and Cycle
of the West she admired. Although she was familiar with much
western writing, she seldom discussed western authors individually
in her letters, and when she did she judged them primarily in
relation to the amount and accuracy of their research. She tended
to approve or disapprove of an author on the grounds of how well
he presented history, especially after she began to think of
herself as a historian.
When the inevitable comparisons
were attempted between her work and that of Nebraska author Willa
Cather, Sandoz pointed out that they were writing of different
eras and different locales. The pioneer region of Cather's Red
Cloud, in south-central Nebraska, was quite different from the
sandhills; it was more settled, closer to railroads, and more
populated in 1860 than the western area was when her father arrived
there in 1884. But the real difference lay much deeper, according
to Sandoz. It was between an artist of Cather's calibre and an
ordinary frontier historian with a desire to write. Robert Overing
in his Master's thesis said of them: "Miss Cather looked
at the prairie through a telescope; Miss Sandoz looked at it
through a microscope. Miss Cather, poised and sure, shot her
game with an unerring bow and arrow; Miss Sandoz used a scattergun,
recording everything it hit," The two shared one major passion,
however, their love for the land.
Sandoz has a respectable twenty-one books to her credit, in addition
to short stories, recollections, and articles. Her work is uneven,
the fiction in particular showing weaknesses. On the other hand
her vast knowledge of her subject matter and her conscientious
and careful craftsmanship give her nonfiction significant literary
quality. As one reviewer said of her last book, The Battle
of the Little Bighorn, "Her brain was the last repository
of unrecorded minutiae of the Plains Indians and the pioneer
whites. Nobody can ever again acquire the intimate knowledge
she had of the Sioux, early fur traders, trappers, buffalo hunters,
and cattlemen. As she once said, posterity will have to take
her word for some of it. . . . Her style sings like one of those
Seventh Cavalry bugles, and [her words] race along at times like
raindrops making light running sounds over the dry earth of the
prairies she knew so well."
HELEN W. STAUFFER, Kearney State College
Note 1. Rudolph Umland, "Just Take Her Word for Some of It," review in Kansas City Times, July 8, 1966.
Selected Bibliography Primary Sources (in chronological order)
1. Nonfiction
Old Jules. Boston: Little, Brown, 1935; Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1962. This and the following five books comprise Sandoz's Great Plain Series, her major historical work.
Crazy Horse: The Strange Man of the Oglalas. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1942.
Cheyenne Autumn. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1953.
The Buffalo Hunters. New York: Hastings House, 1954; Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1978.
The Cattlemen: From the Rio Grande Across the Far Marias. New York: Hastings House, 1958; Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1978.
The Beaver Men, Spearheads of Empire. New York: Hastings House, 1964; Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1978.
These Were the Sioux. New York: Hastings House, 1961; New York: Dell, 1971.
Love Song to the Plains. Harper & Row State Series. New York: Harper & Row, 1961; Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1971.
The Battle of the Little Bighorn. Lippincott Major Battle Series. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1966; Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1978.2. Fiction
Slogum House. Boston: Little, Brown, 1937; Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1981. An allegorical novel.
Capital City. Boston: Little, Brown, 1939. An allegorical novel.
The Tom-Walker. New York: Dial Press, 1947. An allegorical novel.
Miss Morissa: Doctor of the Gold Trail. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1955; Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1980.
The Horsecatcher. Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1957. For young adults.
Son of the Gamblin' Man: The Youth of an Artist. New York: Clarkson Potter, 1960; Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1976.
The Story Catcher. Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1963. For young adults.3. Essays
"The Kinkaider Comes and Goes: Memories of an Adventurous Childhood in the Sandhills of Nebraska." North American Review 229 (April, May 1930):431–42, 576–83.
"The New Frontier Woman." Country Gentleman, Sept. 1936, p. 49.
"There Were Two Sitting Bulls." Blue Book, Nov. 1949, pp. 58–64.
"The Look of the West–1854." Nebraska History 35 (Dec. 1954):243–54.
"Nebraska." Holiday, May 1956, pp. 103–14.
"Outpost in New York." Prairie Schooner 37 (Summer 1963):95–106.
Introduction to George Bird Grinnell, The Cheyenne Indians: Their History and Ways of Life. New York: Cooper Square, 1962.
Introduction to Amos Bad Heart Bull and Helen Blish, A Pictographic History of the Oglala Sioux. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1967.4. Collections of Short Writings
Hostiles and Friendlies: Selected Short Writings of Mari Sandoz. Edited by Virginia Faulkner. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1959 and 1976.
Sandhill Sundays and Other Recollections. Edited by Virginia Faulkner. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1970.Biography and Criticism
Clark, LaVerne Harrell. Revisiting the Plains Indian Country of Mari Sandoz. Marvin, South Dakota: The Blue Cloud Quarterly, 1977. A small book containing personal remarks, quotes from Sandoz's books, and photographs of the sandhills.
Doher, Pam. "The Idioms and Figures of Cheyenne Autumn." Platte Valley Review 5 (April 1977): 119–30. Looks at Sandoz's use of language.
Greenwell, Scott. "Fascists in Fiction: Two Early Novels of Mari Sandoz." Western American Literature 12 (August 1977):133–43. Examines the political implications in Slogum House and Capital City.
MacCampbell, Donald. "Mari Sandoz Discusses Writing." The Writer (November 1935):405–06.
. "Flair Personified: Mari Sandoz." Flair 1 (June 1950):66–69. Personal recollections of Sandoz.
Morton, Beatrice K. "A Critical Appraisal of Mari Sandoz' Miss Morissa: Modern Woman on the Western Frontier." Heritage of Kansas: A Journal of the Great Plains 10 (Fall 1977):37–45. Applies feminist criticism in her evaluation of
Sandoz's woman doctor.
Nicoll, Bruce H. "Mari Sandoz: Nebraska Loner." American West 2 (Spring 1965):32–36. Personal recollections.
Pifer, Caroline. Making of an Author: From the Mementoes of Mari Sandoz. Gordon, Nebraska: Gordon Journal Press, 1972.
Rippey, Barbara. "Toward a New Paradigm: Mari Sandoz's Study of Red and White Myth in Cheyenne Autumn." In Women and Western American Literature, edited by Helen Stauffer and Susan J. Rosowski, pp. 247–66. Troy, N.Y.: Whitson Press, 1982.
Stauffer, Helen Winter. "Mari Sandoz and the University of Nebraska." Prairie Schooner 55 (Spring 1981):253–62. Contains personal recollections of the author.
Whitaker, Rosemary. "An Examination of Violence as Theme in Old Jules and Slogum House." Western American Literature 16 (Fall 1981):217–24.
Bibliography
Whitaker, Rosemary, and Myra Jo Moon. "A Bibliography of Works by and about Mari Sandoz." Bulletin of Bibliography 38 (June 1981):82–91.
Unpublished Studies of Sandoz
McDonald, Judith. "Antaeus of the Running Water: A Biographical Study of the Western Nebraska Years of Mari Sandoz, 1896–1922." Research paper, University of Denver, 1972.
Mattern, Claire. "Mari Sandoz: Her Use of Allegory in Slogum House." Ph.D. dissertation, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, 1981. Postulates that H. L. Mencken influenced Sandoz's use of Nietzsche's theories in that book.
Overing, Robert. "Willa Cather and Mari Sandoz: Differing Viewpoints of the Early West." M.S. thesis, University of South Carolina, 1971.
Walton, Kathleen O'Donnell. "Mari Sandoz: An Initial Critical Appraisal." Ph.D. dissertation, University of Delaware, 1970. A fine overview of the entire oeuvre.
Young, Marguerite. "An Afternoon with Mari Sandoz." Unpublished manuscript in the University of Nebraska Archives, ca. 1949. Written from the point of view of a fellow author.
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