Books with author Mari Sandoz

Praised for swift action and beauty of language, The Horsecatcher is Mari Sandoz's first novel about the Indians she knew so well. Without ever leaving the world of a Cheyenne tribe in the 1830s, she creates a youthful protagonist many readers will recognize in themselves. Young Elk is expected to be a warrior, but killing even an enemy sickens him. He would rather catch and tame the mustangs that run in herds. Sandoz makes it clear that his determination to be a horsecatcher will require a moral and physical courage equal to that of any warrior. And if he must earn the right to live as he wishes, he must also draw closer to family and community.

Young Lance is his father's son when it comes to the daring needed for gaining honors in the war councils of the plains Sioux. Even greater is his seeing medicine. With eyes growing sharper, he watches the warring between tribes, the buffalo hunting, the daily routine—and shows it all in pictures drawn in the dust or on skins with charcoal and color sticks. But catching the story of Sioux society in the 1840s is not for an impetuous and unseasoned youth. Many adventures, sorrows, and hardships must pass before the village sings Lance's new name: Story Catcher, recorder of the history of his people. Rooted in legend, history, and empathetic understanding, The Story Catcher, Sandoz's last novel, won the Levi Strauss Golden Saddleman Award and the Western Writers of America Spur Award.

"The Sioux Indians came into my life before I had any preconceived notions about them," writes Mari Sandoz about the visitors to her family homestead in the Sandhills of Nebraska when she was a child. These Were the Sioux, written in her last decade, takes the reader far inside a world of rituals surrounding puberty, courtship, and marriage, as well as the hunt and the battle.

First published in 1935, Old Jules is unquestionably Mari Sandoz's masterpiece. This portrait of her pioneer father grew out of "the silent hours of listening behind the stove or the wood box, when it was assumed, of course, that I was asleep in bed. So it was that I heard the accounts of the hunts, . . .of the fights with the cattlemen and the sheep-men, of the tragic scarcity of women, when a man had to €˜marry anything that got off the train,€™ of the droughts, the storms, the wind and isolation. But the most impressive stories were those told me by Old Jules himself."

In a blinding blizzard a schoolbus overturns and a young teacher, her seven pupils, and the driver—a mere boy—are stranded in the open country, miles and miles from the nearest ranchhouse. Thus Mari Sandoz introduces a situation that will stretch the limits of human endurance. The exposed little group is armed with no more than the lunches they started out with and only the clothing required for a normal winter's day. As a killer storm takes hold and the mercury plunges below zero they become desperate. How each character facesthe terrifying prospect of freezing to death is a story that has become a small classic. And because it is based upon fact—the author's niece experienced much the same ordeal in the paralyzing midwestern blizzard of January 1949—it has the ring of undisputed truth.Winter Thunder has been named by the Reader’s Digest as one of the ten best American short novels.

Young Lance is his father's son when it comes to the daring needed for gaining honors in the war councils of the plains Sioux. Even greater is his seeing medicine. With eyes growing sharper, he watches the warring between tribes, the buffalo hunting, the daily routine—and shows it all in pictures drawn in the dust or on skins with charcoal and color sticks. But catching the story of Sioux society in the 1840s is not for an impetuous and unseasoned youth. Many adventures, sorrows, and hardships must pass before the village sings Lance's new name: Story Catcher, recorder of the history of his people. Rooted in legend, history, and empathetic understanding, The Story Catcher, Sandoz's last novel, won the Levi Strauss Golden Saddleman Award and the Western Writers of America Spur Award.

In a blinding blizzard a schoolbus overturns and a young teacher, her seven pupils, and the driver—a mere boy—are stranded in the open country, miles and miles from the nearest ranchhouse. Thus Mari Sandoz introduces a situation that will stretch the limits of human endurance. The exposed little group is armed with no more than the lunches they started out with and only the clothing required for a normal winter's day. As a killer storm takes hold and the mercury plunges below zero they become desperate. How each character facesthe terrifying prospect of freezing to death is a story that has become a small classic. And because it is based upon fact—the author's niece experienced much the same ordeal in the paralyzing midwestern blizzard of January 1949—it has the ring of undisputed truth.Winter Thunder has been named by the Reader’s Digest as one of the ten best American short novels.

Praised for swift action and beauty of language, The Horsecatcher is Mari Sandoz's first novel about the Indians she knew so well. Without ever leaving the world of a Cheyenne tribe in the 1830s, she creates a youthful protagonist many readers will recognize in themselves. Young Elk is expected to be a warrior, but killing even an enemy sickens him. He would rather catch and tame the mustangs that run in herds. Sandoz makes it clear that his determination to be a horsecatcher will require a moral and physical courage equal to that of any warrior. And if he must earn the right to live as he wishes, he must also draw closer to family and community.