Sandoz Center sponsors speaker Sept. 27

Wilkinson will tell how he came to be the only person now alive to have read Mari Sandoz’s unpublished novel, The Ungirt Runner, similar in content to her later novel, Old Jules.

Wilkinson has re-visited western Nebraska many times, intending to eventually write a book about Sandoz. In 2011, he spent six months alone in a hunting lodge by the banks of the Niobrara River to experience the landscape as Sandoz did. He recorded an account of his time there in his book, The Red House on the Niobrara.

However, it wasn’t until 2019 he found time to write extensively about Sandoz. When he did, his first task was to locate the unpublished novel. He made inquiries at the University of Nebraska Lincoln archive, also at the Sandoz Center, but came up empty.

Finally, through mutual acquaintances, Wilkinson was able to locate and read the manuscript and take notes at Caroline Sandoz Pifer’s ranch near Gordon in 1993. He discusses the experience in a July 2022 blog entry.

“What I had in front of me was clearly an apprentice writer’s attempt to describe her young life, and – I can state this with conviction – to put on record her every grievance against her (fictionalized) father and mother. It was an exorcism: intemperate, angry, occasionally incoherent. And there was no mistaking the true identity of the fictional characters, nor of the home they inhabited. It was the Old Jules homestead alongside the upper Niobrara,” Wilkinson wrote.