Mary Suzette Sandoz

Mary Suzette Sandoz (Mari Sandoz) was born May 11, 1896 at Sandoz Post Office, Running Water Precinct in Sheridan County, Nebraska. Until the age of nine she was educated at home by her father, then was sent to school only speaking German and walking three miles each way. She knew trappers, traders, Indians and Indian fighters, and learned their stories and their backgrounds.  At ten she published her first story and made the decision to become a writer despite her father’s adamant protestation.

At sixteen she dropped out of school to help support the family which she did by teaching in a rural school in Western Nebraska.  During this time she married Wray Macumber but divorced him after five years and never spoke publicly about her marriage.

In 1922 she attended the University of Nebraska.  Her publication The Peachstone Basket won her honorable mention in 1926 in Harper Intercollegiate Short Story Contest.

She continued to work in various academic positions and further her literary career.  Upon the death of her father she began to publish under the name of Mari Sandoz.  In 1933 her manuscript Old Jules, a biography of her father, was rejected by Atlantic Monthly.  She gave up her dream with that rejection and burned more than seventy five of her stories and dropped into a severe depression.  A little over a year later she submitted the manuscript again and this time won a $5,000 prize and was published. It was the first book in a series of six that captured “the hardship, the violence and gaiety” of frontier life on the plains. 

She worked diligently to complete her last two books, a personal recollection of her life and a novel about the Battle of Little Bighorn.  She succumbed to cancer in March 1966.