Born in Oklahoma, Sandlin spent his early summers in Wyoming while his father worked seasonally for Grand Teton National Park.
Sandlin worked over 40 entry-level jobs including driving an ice cream truck, skinning elk, cooking in a Chinese restaurant, trail inventory for the Forest Service, caretaker of rental cabins, gardener for the Rockefellers, pizza parlor manager, belt buckle buffer, and multiple dishwashing jobs.
Three of his books, Skipped Parts, Sorrow Floats, and Sex and Sunsets, have been produced as movies.
His other novels include Western Swing, Rowdy in Paris, Honey Don’t, Lydia, The Fable of Bing, Social Blunders, Jimi Hendrix Turns Eighty, and The Pyms, Unauthorized Tales of Jackson Hole.
[1] Sex and Sunsets served as the basis for the screenplay of the 2013 Canadian film The Right Kind of Wrong.