Reviews Mari Sandoz: Story Catcher of the Plains. By Helen Winter Stauffer. (Lin coln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982. 322 pages, $22.50.) Mari Sandoz’s life makes for a classic American story. The scrawny, lonely, eldest daughter of immigrant parents, she grew up on the Nebraska frontier, forming “close emotional ties with the prairie, the bluffs, and the river,” hiding behind the stove to overhear the stories told by her eccentric father, Old Jules, and his Indian friends, stories which would become the foundation for her understanding of plains culture and history. As inde pendent, stubborn, and even cantankerous as her father, the major influence on her imagination, she rebelled against the restrictions he set upon her as a woman to make herself into a writer, teacher, and scholar, largely self-taught and eventually acknowledged as a foremost western historian. Always carry ing with her a sense of being an outsider, a visionary response to the land, and the psychic scars of her violent childhood, Sandoz explored in her best work her “emotional identification” with a region and a people. The forces which shaped her character also shaped her understanding of American history, as Helen Stauffer shows in her long-awaited biography, Mari Sandoz: Story Catcher of the Plains. Stauffer focuses on “the author’s life as it relates to her work.” Based on ten years of research as meticulous as that of Sandoz herself, including work with previously unexamined archival materials, Story Catcher of the Plains is tight and lively, gracefully integrating a wealth of information about Sandoz’s professional life, attitudes, and work habits with close discussions of her work. While Stauffer cannot expand greatly upon Sandoz’s own treatment of her early life in Old Jules, she has much to say about the influences on her writing during her formative years in Lincoln. She shows the genesis of her major works and the interrelations among them, traces her sources and explores her research methods, examines her repeated problems with her publishers, and details her awards and the critical reception of her writing. Stauffer empha sizes certain crucial themes and concerns like Sandoz’s efforts to de-bunk western myths, to present the Indian point of view, or to preserve historical materials in connection with several of her works at different times in her life. Believing that Sandoz’sprose contributes as much asher historical insights and her careful research to her stature as a writer, Stauffer is particularly perceptive when she analyzes stylistic innovations and shows how they grew from Sandoz’s sense of human experience. She discusses, for instance, how Sandoz conceived of Love Song of the Plains as a series of tall tales which would express the fantastic stories of the region. While acknowledging the 240 Western American Literature book’s lyricism, Stauffer quotes Sandoz as saying that she hopes some of her “written with barbed wire on sandpaper” style remains. Chronicling one of Sandoz’s many stylistic arguments with her publishers, Stauffer recounts an anecdote where Sandoz called an editor an “hadophile” : “ ‘one who has a mania for the word had and sticks it into prose like telegraph poles along a railroad right of way.’” Stauffer’s analysis of Sandoz’s efforts to recapture stylistically the Indian point of view is especially eloquent: Noting the copy editor’s aversion to her use of participial forms, Mari pointed out that although people from villages and cities tend to drop those forms from their vocabulary, persons who are aware of the continuous changes of life use the -ing form. The Indians, she said, were the extremists, particularly the Cheyennes, who had a pervading sense of the present, as their names often indicated: Flying Hawk, Sitting Man — even Dull Knife, which, translated literally, means Knife-that-isn’t-cutting. Participial forms are indispensible to this sense of life as a continuous thing, an endless, flow ing stream, Mari argued, and for that reason she objected to the editor’s attempt to eliminate them. While she looks most closely at what she calls Sandoz’s public image, Stauffer brings her subject to life through colorful personal details about her apartments, where filing boxes covered kitchen counters and chairs...