Mari Sandoz Books In Order

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books

Publication Order of Short Story Collections

Mari Sandoz was a published American author. She was born May 11, 1896 and would pass away March 10, 1966. She was a Nebraskan novelist, teacher, biographer, and lecturer. She was one of the foremost writers of the state and the West and was known for writing in depth about pioneer life as well as the Plains Indians.

The author was born Marie Susette Sandoz near Hay Springs, Nebraska. She was the oldest of six children that were born to her parents, the Swiss immigrants Jules and Mary Elizabeth Sandoz. She spoke only German until she was nine years old. She spent her childhood doing hard labor on the family farm and even developed snow blindness in an eye after spending the day digging cattle out of a snowdrift.

She was 17 when she graduated from the eighth grade. She then took the rural teachers’ exam secretly and passed, teaching in the nearby country schools despite never going to high school. When she was 18 years old, she married Wray Macumber, a rancher. The marriage was not a happy one and she got divorced in 1919 and relocated to Lincoln.

Over the course of the next 16 years, Mari took on a variety of low paying jobs while also writing using the name Marie Macumber. She enrolled at the University of Nebraska despite not having a high school diploma and throughout those years reportedly claimed that she had gotten over a thousand rejection slips for short stories she had submitted.

She received word that her father was dying and so visited him in 1928, where she found his last request was for her to write his life story. She agreed and started researching his life, documenting his choice to become a pioneer, the work he had done to make a life on the prairie, his place of leadership in the community, and the relationship he had with the area’s local Indians. The book would become Old Jules, and used the author name Mari Sandoz.

In 1933, Mari moved home to Sand Hills to live with her mother due to being malnourished and in bad health. Old Jules had been rejected by every major U.S. publishing house. She even burned several of her manuscripts in a bath tub in the backyard before leaving Lincoln, but still kept writing and started her novel Slogum House, all about a ruthless Nebraska family.

She returned to Lincoln by January of 1934, getting a job at the Nebraska State Historical Society. There she would be named associate editor of Nebraska History magazine. She received notice in 1935 that her book Old Jules had won a non-fiction contest put on by Atlantic Press and would be published at last. The book did well critically and commercially, with some readers being shocked at a distinctly unromantic picturing of the Old West and frontier life.

She would then publish Slogum House in 1937, a book that warned about the rise of fascism while being set in the Sandhills. The book was banned by McCook and Omaha from their libraries due to criticism of the book being ‘dirty’. Sandoz then moved and wrote Capital City, her second novel, which would bring her threats and hate mail, being taken by many as an attack on the city of Lincoln.

In 1940 the author moved to Denver and then three years later moved to New York City to be closer to her publishers and have access to research material on the West. It was in 1942 that her biography of Crazy Horse was published and was written from inside the Lakota world-view. Sandoz would reproduce that same in-depth research and attention to detail in later books like Cheyenne Autumn, The Horsecatcher, and The Story Catcher. She would also develop the history of the west as relevant to an animal species with The Buffalo Hunters, The Cattlemen, and The Beaver Men.

The author also presented summer writing workshops at colleges, reviewed manuscripts that were sent to her by future authors and gave them comments, and taught creative writing through programming that was put on by Nebraska Educational Television.

She would continue writing even close to a month of her own death in 1966 from bone cancer. She would be buried on a hillside looking over her family’s Sandhills ranch south of Gordon, Nebraska. There is a bust of her displayed in the Nebraska State Capitol, and she was inducted into the Nebraska Hall of Fame in 1976. A historical marker is also placed at the location she lived at while writing her novel Old Jules.

Mari Sandoz had many honors and awards given to her through the course of her career. She would receive an honorary Doctorate of Literature from the University of Nebraska in 1950. She was awarded the Distinguished Achievement Award of the Native Sons and Daughters of Nebraska in 1954. In 1958, she received the John Newbery Honor Medal for The Horsecatcher. This was followed by the Spur Award for The Story Catcher (best juvenile fiction), the Saddleman Award (now the Owen Wister Award) for The Story Catcher, in 1969 she was honored with the Mari Sandoz Award (established by the Nebraska Library Association), was inducted into the Nebraska Hall of Fame in 1976, and was inducted into the Hall of Great Westerners in 1998 of the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum.

Slogum House is a 1937 novel by Mari Sandoz. This was a story that first helped the author make a name for herself and is still a classic to this day!

Slogum House was ruled over by Gulla Slogum, and it served as headquarters for a clan that would seduce or steal to get what they wanted and would terrorize if they couldn’t get things that way.

Gulla used her daughter as poisoned bate and her sons as predators, and wanted to put an entire county under her own control. Too often she had been insulted, and worked too hard. Now she was looking for land, power, and revenge. Will she find it? Read this classic to find out!

Capital City is a 1939 novel by Mari Sandoz. This is her most political novel and her angriest.

Capital City shows the troubles and the responses of working people who had no other choice but to endure the Great Depression. It’s an incredibly unique picture of the depression and how it affected the Great Plains and its people, as well as a study of the forces that were fighting for power and wealth.

Sandoz was able to research the daily life of several state capitals and portray how they operated behind the scenes and then put them into this novel that was passionate and given the author’s full breadth of rage and ferocity. Read this classic yourself to take in this powerful and important work from Mari Sandoz by getting a copy of Capital City.