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...

["Slogum House"] is a book that none but Mari Sandoz could have written. No other woman would have dared attempt such a background and such a story and no man possesses the intimate knowledge of a feminine mind as strong and corrosive and ruthless as that of Gulla Slogum. "Slogum House" is a brutal book written for strong stomachs, and its author in her strength casts a shadow tall and deep. Pioneer life—its trials, its hardships, its color—has been the magnet that ...

[Old Jules] is the story of a pioneer in the high plains of the trans-Missouri country—western Nebraska. To understand Old Jules thoroughly and to get the sap out of him, to see him in his rugged beauty, one must understand his habitat. The trans-Mississippi country rises, an inclined plane, from the Father of Waters. In six hundred miles the plane is tilted from five hundred feet above sea level to five thousand feet, at the base of the Rocky Mountains. The land along the valley through the eastern ...

Miss Sandoz, that unusual and powerful writer who is best remembered for her story of her lusty father, "Old Jules," now turns her hand to the life and times of the great warrior of the Oglala Sioux, the quiet and deadly one known as Crazy Horse. Her regard for the man is deep, amounting almost to adoration. And this is understandable. For among all those remarkable Plains Indians none was braver than Crazy Horse, and none more steadfast. The research that obviously has gone into ["Craz...

Distrustful of Leatherstocking and of the vast body of sentimental literature of the frontier, some of us have long suspected that the true conqueror of the land was a hero as brutal as its icy winters but, at times, as picturesque as the sunflowers along its sand trails…. Romanticists have tinted the stark fact of such men, and realists have dimmed their romance, until in our present attempts to relive the life of the West we encounter either the Rousseauesque natural man, ennobled beyond all probab...

Mari Sandoz has written one good book after another, including "Old Jules," "Cheyenne Autumn" and "Buffalo Hunters." These are solid studies of the Old West, displaying not only great knowledge of an area and a period but a great sympathy and an intuitive understanding; at times this has seemed almost a personal involvement, as if the author had actually lived through the times she described and experienced them at first hand. These books, though listed as fiction, ...

Let no one regard "Cheyenne Autumn" as one of those customary attempts by historians to rescue an episode or a figure from oblivion. The episode did not change history, any more than the march of 10,000 Greeks under Xenophon out of Persia changed history, but it has all the elements of that drama. Miss Sandoz has made it into a Lear-like tragedy of displaced persons. The story begins in the fall of 1878 and ends in the following winter. The place is along 2,000 harsh miles between a guarded re...

"The Cattlemen," by Mari Sandoz, is another essay, following Paul Wellman's "The Trampling Herd," at summing up the whole drama of cows and cow people—women excluded—on the ranges of western America. It begins with a good deal of fancifulness over the first Spanish cattle and ends with the contemporary "ritual" of rodeo riding and roping. The best part of the book is laid in the part of the country with which, despite dutiful reading, Mari Sando...

The design on the jacket of Mari Sandoz's novel, "Capital City," suggests a bursting bomb. While the book's materials are potentially explosive, I doubt that its final effect on the reader will be more than that of a mild concussion. For one thing, Miss Sandoz is too obviously out to shock: her very sentences show the strain. For another, though the journalistic value of "Capital City" is high, it is simply not a very good novel. Miss Sandoz aims to pin down with th...

There is really nothing new in [Mari Sandoz's telling of "The Battle of the Little Bighorn"], save the quality of the telling itself, and this rises above all previous accounts. This is the author of "Old Jules," bringing the same creative power and style to a great historic theme, enfolding in top-drawer literature what should have been there long ago. It is almost as if this were properly the climactic work of Miss Sandoz's career…. Buffs may disagree with ...

The fate of the Plains Indian was inextricably bound up with the fate of the buffalo; they fell together. This is the story Miss Sandoz has to tell [in "The Buffalo Hunters"], and she tells it beautifully, forcefully, epically. She knows what she is writing about to the minutest detail; she knows the Great Plains country and loves it—not as a tourist but as a native, well aware of its drawbacks and dangers. A procession of interesting frontier figures, red and white, passes through the ...

[Mari Sandoz] has been carrying on a fervent historico-literary affair with a dead Indian, the consequence of which is a curious, half-interesting, uneven book called "Crazy Horse: The Strange Man of the Oglalas." (p. 84) The author has gone to enormous trouble not merely to get at the tangled truth of our own somewhat shameful relations with the Indians of the region but to project her imagination backward in such a manner as practically to identify herself with the Indian mind. The result is...

Because of my bias in favor of all accounts and stories of the Old West, I hesitate to state categorically that ["Cheyenne Autumn"] is a great book, but I have a deep suspicion that it is. And I say this in spite of the fact that at times the author annoys and irritates me with her wild partisanship in favor of the Cheyennes. The Indians are shown throughout as high-minded and well-intentioned—even when they are looting, killing and burning. And, with few exceptions, the whites are show...