Mari(e) (Susette) Sandoz | Biography

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 American rights, abuse of women, and protection of the environment. Crouched in the woodbox behind the kitchen stove, the young Mari absorbed the real-life stories of the trappers, Indians, and adventurous homesteaders who came to visit her father; she also heard the news and gossip of the community. Sandoz was not afraid to experiment with mixed genres in a work or to use her own Western voice in writing; she fought her editors in the East--all eleven of them--to retain her idiom. She chronicled the dispossessed and the disadvantaged in a style that Charles Poore, reviewer of Slogum House (1937) in The New York Times (27 November 1937), referred to as "written on...
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