was born on this date in 1896. The Writer’s Almanac tells us:
It’s the birthday of Mari Sandoz, born near Hay Springs, Nebraska (1896). She wrote realistic books about pioneers and Indians, including The Buffalo Hunters (1954), The Battle of the Little Bighorn (1966) and Crazy Horse (1942), a biography of the Sioux Indian chief.
She grew up in rural Nebraska, and she had a hard childhood. She quit school after the eighth grade, and spent most of her time helping out with farm and household chores. Her fingers became crooked from holding a hoe for hours at a time, and she suffered from cramps in her arms her entire life. When she was thirteen, she and her brother spent a day digging their cattle out of a blizzard snowdrift, and it left her blind in one eye.
Her father would host soldiers, traders, Indians, and miners from the Black Hills; and she would stay up late at night listening to them tell stories about the West. She became obsessed with the people and places of the Old West, and she decided she wanted to write about them. She went to the University of Nebraska in Lincoln, and a dean there allowed her to take classes even though she didn’t have a high school diploma. She weighed about seventy-five pounds, wore old country clothes, and lived on the tea, sugar, and crackers that she got for free at the dining hall. She would spend hours reading old newspapers in the basement of the State Historical Society, collecting research for the books she was planning to write.
In 1933, Sandoz went back home to live with her mother on the family farm. She had written a manuscript for a book about her father, but it wasn’t accepted by any of the publishers she had sent it to. She had sold a few articles to newspapers and magazines, but not enough to make any real money. She was thirty-seven years old, it was the middle of the Depression, she was malnourished and suffering from migraines, and so she decided give up writing. She burnt her manuscripts and settled in with her mother.
But just a year later, she got word that a publisher had decided to publish the book about her father, Old Jules (1935). It became a Book-of-the-Month club selection and a bestseller, and it allowed Sandoz to go on to write many more books about frontier life.
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