page_title: Mari Sandoz
section_title: Early writings
hierarchical_section_title: Mari Sandoz / Early writings
caption_attribution_description: English: Nebraska Sandhills in Hooker County, Nebraska, seen from Nebraska Highway 97 south of the Dismal River.
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: For the next sixteen years, Mari held a variety of low-paying jobs, while writing—to almost no success—under her married name, Marie Macumber. Despite her lack of a high school diploma, she managed to enroll at the University of Nebraska, thanks to a sympathetic dean.  During those years, she claimed to have received over a thousand rejection slips for her short stories.
  In 1928, when she received word her father was dying, she visited her family, and was stunned by his last request: he asked her to write his life story. She began extensive research on his life, and documented his decision to become a pioneer, his hard work chiselling out a life on the prairie, his leadership within the pioneer community, and his friendship with the local Indians in the area. The resulting book was Old Jules, published under the name Mari Sandoz, which she had resumed using in 1929.
  In 1933, malnourished and in poor health, she moved back home to the Sand Hills to stay with her mother.  Every major publishing house in the United States had rejected Old Jules. Before she left Lincoln, Sandoz tossed over 70 of her manuscripts into a wash tub in her backyard and burned them.
  Yet she continued to write, and began work on her next novel, Slogum House, a gritty and realistic tale about a ruthless Nebraska family.  By January 1934, she returned to Lincoln, and got a job at the Nebraska State Historical Society, where she became associate editor of Nebraska History magazine.
  In 1935, she received word that her revised version of Old Jules had won a non-fiction contest held by Atlantic Press, after fourteen rejections. Finally, her book would be published. Before that happened, however, she had to fight her editor to retain the distinctive Western idiom in which she had written the book, as her publishers wanted her to standardize the English used in the book.
  The book was well-received critically and commercially when it was issued, and became a Book of the Month Club selection.  Some readers were shocked at her unromantic depiction of the Old West, as well as her strong language and realistic portrayal of the hardships of frontier life.
caption: The Sand Hills of Western Nebraska
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