Background
Mary Hunter Austin was born Mary Hunter on September 9, 1868, at Carlinville, Illinois, United States. She was the fourth of six children born to Susannah (née Graham) and George Hunter.
Mary Hunter Austin was born Mary Hunter on September 9, 1868, at Carlinville, Illinois, United States. She was the fourth of six children born to Susannah (née Graham) and George Hunter.
Mary graduated from Blackburn College in 1888.
Mary moved with her family to Bakersfield, California. Then she married and for several years she lived in various towns in California’s Owens Valley. Mary Austin soon learned to love the desert and the Native Americans who lived in it, and both figured in the sketches that constituted her first book, The Land of Little Rain (1903), which was a great and immediate success. It was followed by a collection of stories, The Basket Woman (1904), a romantic novel, Isidro (1905), and a collection of regional sketches, The Flock (1906).
In 1905 she moved to Carmel, California. She later traveled to Italy, France, and England. Returning to New York City, she became associated with John Reed, Walter Lippmann, and others of the group of writers and artists whose centre was Mabel Dodge Luhan. A play, The Arrow Maker (1911), and her best novel, A Woman of Genius (1912), were the product of those New York years, as were scores of rather didactic articles on socialism, women’s rights, and a variety of other topics and such novels as The Ford (1917) and No. 26 Jayne Street (1920).
In 1924 Austin settled in Santa Fe, New Mexico. That year she published The Land of Journeys’ Ending and followed it with, among other books, Everyman’s Genius (1925), The Children Sing in the Far West (1928; like her earlier The American Rhythm [1923], a collection of Native American songs and original poems inspired by them), Starry Adventure (1931), Experiences Facing Death (1931), and an autobiography, Earth Horizon (1932).
Austin’s best writing, which is concerned with nature or Native American life, is reminiscent of the work of Ralph Waldo Emerson and John Muir in its transcendental tone and occasional primitivist leaning. She was active in movements to preserve Native American arts, crafts, and culture.
Austin died August 13, 1934, in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
A meeting H.G. Wells and other intellectuals strengthened her feminist ideas and added a strong commitment to socialism to her own deeply personal and sustaining form of mysticism.
Quotations:
"Man is not himself only...He is all that he sees; all that flows to him from a thousand sources...He is the land, the lift of its mountain lines, the reach of its valleys."
"This is the sense of the desert hills, that there is room enough and time enough."
"What women have to stand on squarely [is] not their ability to see the world in the way men see it, but the importance and validity of their seeing it in some other way."
"For all the toll the desert takes of a man it gives compensations, deep breaths, deep sleep, and the communion of the stars."
"When a woman ceases to alter the fashion of her hair, you guess that she has passed the crisis of her experience."
Mary married Stafford Wallace Austin on May 18, 1891 in Bakersfield, California. They divorced in 1914. She had a daughter Ruth.