Born Mary Anna Hallock on 19 November 1847 on a farm near Milton, a town not far from Poughkeepsie, New York, this writer who came to be associated with the West was educated in the East, and the values derived from her Quaker upbringing and Eastern background often surfaced in her fiction. Young Mary, who was called Molly, and her three older siblings, Philadelphia, Tom, and Bessie, were devoted to their mother, Ann Burling Hallock. Her father, Nathaniel Hallock, was an energetic farmer whose library was stocked with periodicals and volumes of poetry, the source of much of her early reading. Among the Victorian poets, she favored Alfred, Lord Tennyson. First attending Poughkeepsie Female Collegiate Seminary, she went on to study art at the women's school of design at the Cooper Institute. She had four of her drawings published in A. D. Richardson's Beyond the Mississippi in 1867 and soon established herself as an illustrator. Her drawings were featured in The Century Illustrated Magazine as well as in an 1874 edition of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's The Hanging of the Crane and an 1876 edition of Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter.
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