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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, conflicts, activities, and business interests associated with Western mining in the nineteenth century. Married to an engineer whose career took his family to a variety of Western locales, she was often asked to provide stories and illustrations of these settings for Eastern readers. Tinged with romance and melodrama, her early stories reached a wide readership. As her fiction matured, romantic elements and stock situations diminished, and she explored the tensions between the dreams and professional aspirations of her male characters and the civilizing instincts and familial relationships cherished by her female characters. After the turn of the century she wrote several novels that surpassed her mining stories in refinement of theme and technique, but these later works failed to have a wide appeal.
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