Most Popular Books by Mary Austin

In her autobiography, published in 1932, Austin speaks frankly about her life while also commenting on the events and decisions that formed and influenced her life and writing. A prolific writer, she wrote novels, short stories, essays, plays, and poetry. She was an early advocate for environmental issues as well as the rights of women and minority groups.

A precursor of Sinclair Lewis''s ''Main Street'' and a counterpoint to Theodore Dreiser''s ''Sister Carrie'', this 1912 novel deals poignantly and honestly with the costs of a woman''s ambitions. Austin (1868-1934) portrays her heroine''s decision to leave a dull husband in a Midwestern town to pursue an acting career and her rise to fame, against the background of the cramping social order of the time.

Mary Austin''s 1917 novel illuminates one of the crucial issues in California history--the usurpation of water from the Owens Valley. Ranging from the eastern Sierra to the financial district in San Francisco, the plot portrays the frenzied speculation in land and resources, labor protests, and feminist organizing of the time, exemplified in the successful efforts of an independent young woman to buy back her family''s Owens Valley ranch.

Mary Austin was a novelist and essayist who wrote about Native American culture and social problems. This book contains: - The Land Of Little Rain. - Water Trails Of The Ceriso. - The Scavengers. - The Pocket Hunter. - Shoshone Land. - Jimville. - My Neighbor''s Field.

High quality reprint of The Man Jesus by Mary Hunter Austin.

Mary Austin''s love of the desert is everywhere evident in The Land of Little Rain, a collection of fourteen vignettes about the land and people of the region that today includes Death Valley National Park and the Mojave National Preserve. Part nature essay, personal essay, folk legend, and local history of the California Sierras, this enduring American classic resists classification. Her lyrical observations are infused with a deep understanding of the flora and fauna of the area and an appreciation of the people she encountered and befriended there-Shoshones and Paiutes, Mexican and Chinese immigrants, shepherds, stagecoach drivers, and miners among them. Austin''s writings have been compared to the work of Ralph Waldo Emerson, John Muir, and Aldo Leopard, but her poetic sensibility is purely original, winsome, and entirely her own. This Warbler Classics paperback includes the illustrations that appeared in the original edition and a detailed biographical note.

'' Austin is credited with 30 book-length works and over 200 novels, dramas, short stories, poems, articles, and essays ? A writer, a feminist and ethnographer who was in advance of her time ? Insights on how California, looked a hundred years ago. Mary Austin is not a household word today, but for much of the early 20th century she was a well-known figure, and one of the few women, who made her way as a writer and chronicler of the West and California. Never on a soapbox, but firm in her convictions she fought the injustice she saw in the treatment of Hispanics and Indians through her work. She is best known for her Land of Little Rain originally published in 1903, a classic nature book that evokes the mysticism and spirituality of the American Southwest

High quality reprint of Love and the Soul Maker by Mary Hunter Austin.

Best known today for her nature writing and southwestern cultural studies, Mary Hunter Austin (1868-1934) has been increasingly recognized for her outspoken essays on feminist themes. This volume collects her nonfiction journalism, with each essay prefaced by brief introductory remarks by the editor. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Retold in the Evocative language of a true enthusiast of the Southwest, One-Smoke Stories is Mary Austin''s compilation of tales from Native American, Spanish colonial, mestizo, and European American peoples of the Southwest. Through folktales, animal tales, and other genres of popular lore, Austin creates a primer of early-twentieth-century Southwestern cultures. Many stories offer political critiques of intercultural conflicts such as the homesteader''s conquest of nature, the assimilation policies of Christian missionaries, and the abuses of colonial government. Others celebrate the multicultural Southwest by representing the spirituality, humor, love, loyalty, and sense of community among the Southwest''s diverse peoples. Originally published in 1934, One-Smoke Stories is one of several early-twentieth-century works -- like Charles W. Chesnutt''s The Conjure Woman, Mourning Dove''s Cogewea, the Half-Blood, and Zora Neale Hurston''s Their Eyes Were Watching God -- that bridged the oral and literary realms by intertwining folklore and fiction. Introduced by Noreen Groover Lape, this new edition of One-Smoke Stories raises timely questions about the permeability of cultural borders. Book jacket.

Mary Austin Holley (1784–1846), a cousin of Stephen F. Austin, journeyed to Texas on three separate occasions. Her first visit, in 1831, resulted in the publication of her book, Texas. Her second and third trips, in 1835 and 1837, were depicted in her diary. This witty, observant, and highly perceptive woman captured the infant Texas in her journal—the Mexican state moving toward rebellion and the new Republic, dynamic and struggling with a great destiny. The Holley diary is an important insight into the social and political history of early Texas.

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.

I Confess to a great liking for the Indian fashion of name-giving: every man known by that phrase which best expresses him to whoso names him. Thus he may be Mighty-Hunter, or Man-Afraid-of-a-Bear, according as he is called by friend or enemy, and Scar-Face to those who knew him by the eye''s grasp only. No other fashion, I think, sets so well with the various natures that inhabit in us, and if you agree with me you will understand why so few names are written here as they appear in the geography. For if I love a lake known by the name of the man who discovered it, which endears itself by reason of the close-locked pines it nourishes about its borders, you may look in my account to find it so described. But if the Indians have been there before me, you shall have their name, which is always beautifully fit and does not originate in the poor human desire for perpetuity.

Jordan, a Vatican commander, has built a career on vanquishing the remnants of otherworldly creatures from a disenchanted medieval Europe, but increasingly he finds himself torn between duty and his desire to understand the magic that has been forbidden

Mary Austin''s The Land of Little Rain (1903) and Lost Borders (1909), both set in the California desert, make intimate connections between animals, people, and the land they inhabit. For Austin, the two indispensable conditions of her fiction were that the region must enter the story "as another character, as the instigator of plot," and that the story must reflect "the essential qualities of the land." In The Land of Little Rain, Austin''s attention to natural detail allows her to write prose that is geologically, 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.

Introduction and Illustrations by Ann H. Zwinger