It’s the birthday of western writer Mari Sandoz (b. in 1896 or 1901), whose unromantic and carefully researched portrayals of pioneer and Indian life were ahead of their time and elicited hate mail.

Sandoz was born in a two-room shack in Nebraska. Her mother, Mary Elizabeth Fehr, was the fourth wife of her father, Jules Sandoz, a bad-tempered man whose first two wives ran off and who deserted his third. (Okay, by Wife #4, under those circumstances, I’m thinking it was you, Jules. It was you.) Sandoz grew up witnessing settler-cattleman fights; a hired killer gunned down her uncle and came for her father, who “met him with a Winchester at his shoulder, ready” (“Mari Sandoz, Author, 65, Dies; Historian of Nebraska Plains,” March 11, 1966, New York Times). Sandoz learned to hunt, remove pelts, and do all those unpleasant pioneer-type things that thank God we don’t have to do today, and at about 14 years old went snow blind after a day of digging cattle out of the snow during a May blizzard. She was totally blind for six weeks and ultimately lost the use of one eye entirely. (Sadly, she never had children on which she could inflict that story. Think of whipping that out when your kid complains about, well, anything.)

Sandoz experienced a ton of rejection before her history of her father’s life, Old Jules (1935), won a nonfiction competition in The Atlantic Monthly and was published. Slogum House (1937), the brutal narrative of a Nebraskan clan, garnered hate mail and was banned in public libraries in that state because it was thought to attack the character of rural Nebraskans. Her biography, Crazy Horse: The Strange Man of the Oglalas (1942), was unusual for being told from within the Lakota world view.

Sandoz wrote a number of other fiction and non-fiction books, including The Horsecatcher (1957), which was a Newbery Medal Honor Book. She eventually lived in Greenwich Village in a four-story walk-up, though she returned frequently to the Nebraska plains to research her writing. She died of bone cancer in 1966.

Enjoy whatever sun you glimpse on this fine Friday and stay scrupulously honest to the data.