Mary Austin

Best remembered for The Land of Little Rain (1903), which established her as a unique voice of the American West, Mary Austin was the author of nearly thirty books and hundreds of short works. Her essays, novels, plays, short stories, poems, and articles draw upon her impressions of the indigenous peoples and terrains of California, Arizona, and New Mexico. Throughout her work, glimmers of her idiosyncratic feminism appear; not until long after her death in 1934 did she come to be celebrated for her feminist perspective. This anthology of Austin's stories, articles, and excerpts from her books represents the broad range of her writing over a career spanning four decades and helps illuminate the life and work of this major American writer. Each chapter focuses on a specific genre and includes an introduction by editor Esther Lanigan, herself an Austin biographer.

A well-known, popular, and prolific writer, Austin published thirty-three books and three plays and was closely associated with many important literary figures of her time, including H. G. Wells, George Bernard Shaw, Mabel Dodge Luhan, Jack London, and Willa Cather. Still best known today for her nature writing and southwestern cultural studies, Austin has been increasingly recognized for her work on feminist themes, including the play The Arrow Maker, the nonfiction The Young Woman Citizen, and the novels A Woman of Genius and No. 26 Jayne Street. Beyond Borders demonstrates that variety. In addition to her monographs, Austin also published her short fiction and essays in periodicals. In fact, like many a writer earning a living from her work, Austin wrote prolifically for the magazine market, producing during her career over two hundred individual pieces published in over sixty periodicals. In support of Austin's essays, Reuben J. Ellis provides an introduction that establishes a biographical and historical context for Austin's work. In addition, each individual Austin essay is prefaced by brief introductory remarks by the editor. A selected bibliography of Austin's essays is also included.

"In The Land of Little Rain, Austin's attention to natural detail allows her to write prose that is geographically, biologically, and botanically accurate at the same time that it offers metaphorical insight into human emotional and spiritual experience. In Lost Borders, Austin focuses on both white and Indian women's experiences in the desert, looks for the sources of their deprivation, and finds them in the ways life betrays them, usually in the guise of men. She offers several portraits of strong women characters but ultimately identifies herself with the desert, which she personifies as a woman."

"When Taos Pueblo, his first book, was published in 1930, Ansel Adams was just 28 ... Adams had only recently put aside a nascent career as a concert pianist to pursue photography full time, but he still wasn't sure he could make a go of it when he took up the Taos project in collaboration with Mary Austin, a popular novelist and nature writer based in Santa Fe. ... The twelve photos in Taos Pueblo--each an original print on silver bromide paper prepared especially for the book by Adam's San Francisco custom-paper supplier, William Dassonville--include several formal portraits reminiscent of Edward Curtis and nearly circumscribed, almost intimate landscapes that are a far cry from the inflated magnificence associated with Adam's later work. ... The book's solid success at the height of the Depression (all 108 copies sold over two years at $75 a piece) encouraged Adams to continue in his course as a photographer of the American landscape."--The Book of 101 Books : Seminal Photographic Books of the Twentieth Century / Edited by Andrew Roth. New York : PPP Editions in association with Ruth Horowitz, 2001.

The renowned author describes the epic journey she undertook in 1923, when she left her East Coast home at the age of fifty-five to travel through the southwestern United States, where she had lived as a child and where she would later retire, in a series of poetic essays that explore the history, culture and ecology of the land between the Colorado River and the Rio Grande.

Mary Austin was one of the first to recognize that Native American myths and culture were in danger of being eroded and lost. She then took upon herself the duty of tracking down American Indian songs and poems, saying that she was not giving a translation of the original but what she preferred to call a 're-expression' which she referred to as 'reëxpressions.' It was her belief that the life and environment of the person who made up the words was an important part of understanding the rhythm and meaning of the work. She considered tribal dancing an essential part of the sung or spoken words and her extensive research led first to lectures and later to the publication of The American Rhythm. It was her work in this field that resulted in Austin being named an Associate in Native American Literature by the School of American Research in Santa Fe, New Mexico.--Amazon.com.