Mary Austin and Lincoln Steffens

Abstract

Recently there has been a revival of interest in the American writer Mary Hunter Austin (1868-1934). Once hailed as the Queen Victoria of American letters, she wrote in a wide variety of genres and was one of the most versatile and prolific of American women writers.' Her literary achievements include thirty-four published books, numerous poems, plays, short stories, articles and reviews, and an extensive personal correspondence with celebrated members of the American cultural and intellectual community. Ranked with Henry Thoreau and John Muir as a naturalist, she also achieved an international reputation as poet, mystic, feminist, folklorist, and novelist. Following her death in 1934 she was praised as perhaps the most monumental of our American women writers.2 Mary Austin was born in Carlinville, Illinois on 9 September 1868. She attended local schools and was graduated with a Bachelor of Science Degree from Blackburn College. Shortly after her graduation she traveled west with her widowed mother and brother. In California the family unsuccessfully attempted to homestead 540 acres of barren range land in Tejon Pass at the edge of the Mojave Desert. There Mary Austin began to collect material for her future stories. An unsuccessful marriage, financial hardship, and repeated moves among sparsely populated towns along the borders of Death Valley followed. A daughter born in the second year of her marriage was mentally retarded. Discouraged by the hardships of desert life, ill health, and the care of her daughter, Mary Austin struggled to continue her writing. Her first story, Mother of Felipe, appeared in the Overland Monthly in 1892. This was followed by publications in Out West, Cosmopolitan, and the Atlantic Monthly. In 1903 the publication of her first book, The Land of Little Rain, storysketches describing and interpreting desert life, won her immediate fame among literary critics as one of America's important new writers. In 1906, after eighteen years in the California desert, she left her husband and daughter and moved to the literary colony of Carmel on the California