Lincoln, Nebraska, Was a ‘Greenwich Village’ on the Prairie for Mari Sandoz

Were I to write a Mari Sandoz biopic, I’d start with a shadow racing across her desk. I’d start at 3:30 p.m. on Wednesday, Jan. 16, 1935. I’d start with a 39-year-old hayseed — thin as a fence post and prickly as barbed wire — assaulting her typewriter on the ninth floor of the Nebraska State Capitol as a local bank teller plunges 135 feet to his death on the stone transept below. Perhaps I’d cut to the fingernail marks he left on the observation deck five floors above, or the note he left behind. I’d then creep slowly back up to Sandoz, red hair in a French bun, hands on her hips, standing quietly — even knowingly — at the window while her co-workers at the historical society buzz around her.

Roll credits.

Born and raised in the remote Nebraska Sandhills, roughly 400 miles west of Lincoln, the author Mari Sandoz plowed her way into the literary canon of the Great Plains — just months after the teller’s leap — when she finally published “Old Jules,” the biography of her father, a Swiss homesteader. “On putting down this book,” wrote The New York Times Book Review in 1935, “one feels that one has read the history of all pioneering.” Before her death from bone cancer in 1966, she would publish 18 more, fiction and nonfiction alike, enshrining her status — alongside Walter Prescott Webb, Bernard DeVoto, Wallace Stegner and others — as one of the most cleareyed chroniclers of the American frontier.

I’ve long felt a certain kinship with Sandoz. I, too, fled the Sandhills. I, too, graduated from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. I, too, began my writing career in the city. And I, too, sometimes chafe at my New York editors. “Damn it, you and I know the East has long bled the west white, is still doing it, and I’m to distort facts to please a book public,” she once wrote to a friend. “Why, I’d rather write my own way and dig ditches for my soup and hard tack than write lies for a yacht and sables. Row boat and rabbit’s more my style anyway.”

Sandoz would eventually leave Lincoln, first for Denver and then for New York, but she spent more years in Nebraska’s capital city than anywhere else. And though she criticized Lincoln throughout her career — calling it “the last word in decadent middle-class towns” and “particularly unkind” to writers — she would eventually soften on the city. Sort of. In a short essay for The Lincoln Star, the former morning newspaper, in 1959, she wrote, “I remember…