Mary Hallock Foote (1847–1938) is an American author and illustrator. She is best known for her illustrated short stories and novels portraying life in the mining communities of the turn-of-the-century American W. Her most popular work is "Edith Bonham" (1917).
Background
Mary Hallock Foote was born on November 19, 1847, at Milton-on-Hudson, New York, the youngest of four children. Her close-knit farming family were English Quakers, Free-Soil Republicans of English stock, sympathetic to anti-slavery, temperance, and women's rights.Their farmhouse was a hub of activity whilst Mary was growing up.
Education
From 1860-1864 Mary attended Poughkeepsie Female Seminary (later Vassar) and in Fall 1864 entered the Cooper School of Design for Women in NYC, the only institution at the time when anything approaching an art education could be had for a girl. There she met Helena de Kay, daughter of a prominent New York family and later wife of the distinguished poet and editor of Century Magazine, Richard Watson Gilder, beginning a life-long friendship and a transcontinental correspondence spanning 50 years.
New York teachers included Samuel Frost Johnson, with whom she studied color, John A.E. Whitney, Charles H. Burt, Wm. Rimmer, and Wm. J. Linton. Linton, a well-known English artist, was especially helpful to Foote, teaching her to draw directly on wood rather than on thin paper which then had to be placed face down onto a wood block, with the image transferred to the block by tracing on the paper from the reverse side. Under the tutelage of this exceptional teacher, Foote became one of the America's best designers on the wood.
Career
In 1876 she married Arthur De Wint Foote, a mining engineer, and subsequently lived in the mining regions of California,. Idaho, Colorado and Mexico. Mary Hallock Foote found herself inspired by the "real West" country and the varying peoples she encountered there. She soon was drawing it, and writing and telling about it. A number of her works appeared in the pages of Century and the Atlantic Monthly magazines to an appreciative audience. Her first novel The Led-Horse Claim: A Romance of a Mining Camp appeared in 1883 and a year later the family settled in Boise, Idaho.
She is best known for her stories of place, in which she portrayed the rough, picturesque life she experienced and observed in the old West, especially that in the early mining towns. She wrote several novels, and illustrated stories and novels by other authors for various publishers. Her letters provide a biography of her husband as well as her autobiography; they were collected by Rodman Paul, who published them in 1972 as the memoir A Victorian Gentlewoman in the Far West.
She soon developed her gift of portraying authentic depictions of community life in the mining camps, gleaning material from her husband and his team who were designing irrigation systems in the Boise valley. Adding an element of romance, her characters also deal with the hardships and challenges of settling in a sometimes harsh and isolating world.
Although she found material for her stories and illustrations wherever she was, it was the Leadville experience in 1879 that gave Foote some of the richest characterizations for her fiction. Stories based on the Leadville characters, especially her first novel, The Led-Horse Claim (1883), established Foote's reputation as a Western writer.
Politics
Her close-knit farming family were Quakers, Free-Soil Republicans of English stock, sympathetic to anti-slavery, temperance, and women's rights.