Mari Sandoz's struggles as a writer were a metaphor for the landscape of her origin, the Great Plains. A wind-whistled place, home to drought, blizzards, tornados, and plagues of grasshoppers, its very hardness has branded it America's most provincial and uninteresting region. From this unforgiving milieu she fashioned eighteen books with the tenacity of a homesteader harnessed to a plow. Maybe her career would have been easier if -- like her celebrated contemporary Willa Cather -- she had not waited until later in her life to leave.
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