page_title: Mari Sandoz
section_title: Later life and works
hierarchical_section_title: Mari Sandoz / Later life and works
caption_attribution_description: English: Bison herd grazing at the National Bison Range
context_page_description: Mari Susette Sandoz was a Nebraska novelist, biographer, lecturer, and teacher. She became one of the West's foremost writers, and wrote extensively about pioneer life and the Plains Indians. She received the Newbery Medal.
context_section_description: In 1937, Sandoz published Slogum House, a novel set in the Sandhills that warned about the rise of fascism. The novel was criticized for being dirty, and both the Nebraska cities of McCook and Omaha banned it from their respective libraries in 1938. During this time, Sandoz moved the Shurtleff Arms at 645 South 17th Street. This is the only extant Lincoln residence of Sandoz. There she wrote her second novel Capital City (1939), which brought her notoriety of a different nature: hate mail and threats. Slogum House was considered an attack on the character of rural Nebraskans, and Capital City was perceived as an assault on the city of Lincoln.
  In 1940, Sandoz moved to Denver, partly to escape the backlash, and also for better research facilities.  Later, in 1943, she settled in New York City so she could access the research material on the West, and have proximity to her publishers.
  In 1942 her monumental biography of the great Lakota leader Crazy Horse was published.  It is entitled Crazy Horse: The Strange Man of the Oglalas.  Sandoz proved to be ahead of her time by writing the biography from within the Lakota world-view, using Lakota concepts and metaphors, and even replicating Lakota patterns of speech.  Some critics consider it her greatest work. As she says in her preface to Crazy Horse: 
  I have used the simplest words possible, hoping by idiom and figures and the under-lying 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.
  Her meticulous attention to detail, her in-depth research, and her admiration of the Plains Indian culture is also noticeable in later works such as Cheyenne Autumn (1953), The Horsecatcher (1957), and The Story Catcher (1963).
  Three other books of her Great Plains series, The Buffalo Hunters (1954), one of her best known, and The Cattlemen (1958) and The Beaver Men (1964) each develop the history of the West in relation to an animal species.
  Sandoz liked to encourage other writers. She presented summer writing workshops at institutions such as the University of Wisconsin–Madison, reviewed manuscripts sent to her by aspiring authors and provided helpful comments, and taught creative writing through programming produced by Nebraska Educational Television.  She advised writers to "pick a subject you know well, and write about it."  Sandoz kept writing, even within a month of her death from bone cancer in 1966.
  By her request, she was buried south of Gordon, Nebraska, on a hillside overlooking her family's Sandhills ranch.
  A bust of Sandoz along with others of the Nebraska Hall of Fame are displayed in the Nebraska State Capitol.  A historical marker, placed by the Mari Sandoz Heritage Society is at the location  where she lived  while writing Old Jules.
caption: Herd of buffalo grazing in a Western meadow.
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