Mary (Hunter) Austin Biography

Dictionary of Literary Biography on Mary (Hunter) Austin

When she placed her friend Willa Cather at the forefront of a group of American writers who are "so intrinsically western in their point of view that any book by them becomes a western," Mary Hunter Austin could well have been writing about herself. Well known during her lifetime--as an American nature writer in the tradition of Henry David Thoreau, as a leading feminist theorist, and as an expert on Native American cultures--but largely forgotten after her death in 1934, Austin has received renewed attention since the early 1980s. Readers are increasingly drawn to and challenged by her unconventional blending of feminism, environmental ethics, social critique, and interpretations and adaptations of Native American, Hispanic American, and European American mythological traditions. Her writings resist neat categorization and open up debates about the exclusions that such categories perform.

In most of her works, particularly in her best known--The Land of Little Rain (1903), Lost Borders (1909), The Land of Journey's Ending (1924), and Earth Horizon: An Autobiography (1932)--Austin weaves her diverse interests together into depictions that show how life in the desert Southwest can be both fulfilling and nourishing for those who adapt themselves to its conditions.

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