Mary Hallock Foote was one of the first woman regionalists to write about the western part of the United States. Born and raised in New York State, she went west with her mining engineer husband at the age of twenty-nine and did not live permanently in...

One of the foremost Western writers of her age, Mary Hallock Foote is today regarded primarily as a local-color writer whose writing does not merit scrutiny, except from literary historians interested in her work as an archive of a bygone age. Yet, in...

Mary Hallock Foote began her literary career by writing vivid stories, sketches, and novels about mining camps in the West. Unlike Bret Harte, who had little firsthand knowledge of the subject, Foote was able to study the locales, personalities,...

In the following excerpts from her full-length biographical and critical study of Foote, Johnson discusses the ways in which Foote's life in the West influenced her early writing; evaluates her first novel The Led-Horse Claim, her more mature novels The Chosen Valley and The Desert and the Sown, and her historical romance The Royal Americans; and provides an overall assessment of Foote's importance in American literary history.

In the following essay, Walsh attempts to clarify to what extent Wallace Stegner borrowed material from Foote for his 1971 novel Angle of Repose and examines the ways in which Foote's actual life was distorted by its fictional representation in Stegner's book.

In the following essay, Floyd places both Foote and Bret Harte in the context of newer critical perspectives which question old stereotypes about the way writers have dealt with the tug-and-pull between East and West.