In one or another of these roles she became the friend or associate of such notables as George Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, Joseph Conrad, Jack London, Sinclair Lewis, Amy Lowell, Emma Goldman, Isadora Duncan, Lincoln Steffens, Theodore Roosevelt, and Herbert Hoover. She lectured at the invitation of the Fabian Society and the Yale School of Drama. She studied prayer technique with a Papal adviser, a Paiute medicine man, and the secret brotherhood of the Penitentes of New Mexico. At her death, prestigious publications paid her affectionate tribute.
Today Austin is virtually unknown except to scholars of Southwestern literature, who hail her collections of regional sketches-- The Flock (1906), Lost Borders (1909), The Land of Journey's Ending (1924), and especially The Land of Little Rain (1903)--as American classics, and to students of American autobiography, who give high praise to Earth Horizon (1932). In her own time, however, she was equally well known as a novelist, and her name was included in any survey of the field.
Austin was born and reared in Carlinville, Illinois, a small college town. Her father, a lawyer and town magistrate, had emigrated from England as a young man, had served with distinction as an officer in the Civil War, and had been discharged with seriously damaged health.
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