In her novels, biographies, and histories Mari Sandoz immortalized the stories and recorded the voices she had heard as a child, including some distinctive but long-ignored Western voices. Her works anticipate many later concerns, such as Native...

The noted Western historian, novelist, and teacher Mari Sandoz was born Marie Susette Sandoz, 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...

Mari Sandoz was a didactic writer. Because of her tendency toward instruction, she found much of American fiction—particularly romantic western novels—thin, "without anything of the push and throb of life, totally inconsequential." She liked bone and muscle in literature. She blamed what she considered the poor quality of domestic fiction on the American writers' tendency to conform to the commercial market, and waged a continuous battle herself against what she termed &#x...

Mari Sandoz is recognized as a novelist, historian, and biographer, as well as an authority on the Indians of the Great Plains. Her work varies in quality, her novels usually considered least successful, and her histories, particularly her biographies, most trenchant. In the latter she has 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. (p. 1) Mari seemed to make little conscious distinction between methods of wri...

It is not altogether unusual, in these literate days, to come upon a first novel of artistic merit. But it is always bound to be something of an event when a first novel not only proves to be admirable on the score of craftmanship but also introduces to the ranks of contemporary novelists a new and original and arresting personality. This is what "Slogum House" does. While it is a first novel, and one to review with surprise and remember with pleasure, it is not a first book. Mari Sandoz...