The successful New York author describes the epic journey she undertook in 1923, when she left her East Coast home at the age of fifty-five to travel through the southwestern United States, where she had lived as a child and where she would later retire. Part memoir, part travel narrative, part historical investigation, and part ecological study, T

-Between the high Sierras south from Yosemite--east and south over a very great assemblage of broken ranges beyond Death Valley, and on illimitably into the Mojave Desert- is the territory that Mary Austin calls the Land of Little Rain. In this classic collection of meditations on the wonders of this region, Austin generously shares -such news of the land, of its trails and what is astir in them, as one lover of it can give to another.- Her vivid writings capture the landscape--from burnt hills to sun-baked mesas--as well as the rich variety of plant and animal life, and the few human beings...

Mary Austin's The Land of Little Rain (1903) and Lost Borders (1909), both set in the California desert, make intimate connections between animals, people, and the land they inhabit. For Austin, the two indispensable conditions of her fiction were that the region must enter the story "as another character, as the instigator of plot," and that the story must reflect "the essential qualities of the land."

In The Land of Little Rain, Austin's attention to natural detail allows her to write prose that is geologically, biologically, and botanically accurate at the...

Mary Austin was one of the first to recognize that Native American myths and culture were in danger of being eroded and lost. She then took upon herself the duty of tracking down American Indian songs and poems, saying that she was not giving a translation of the original but what she preferred to call a "re-expression" which she referred to as "reexpressions." It was her belief that the life and environment of the person who made up the words was an important part of understanding the rhythm and meaning of the work. She considered tribal dancing an essential part of the sung or spoken words...

Austin's charming and evocative stories dramatize the legacy of conquest upon a land and its native peoples. Although these stories, out of print for almost a century, were first intended as delightful and instructive reading for children, on another level they are an intense examination of the dramatic implications of a legacy of conquest upon the land and its native peoples. In Austin s tales, cocky young glaciers, contemplative pine trees, resourceful ancient Paiutes, and rabbits too clever for their own good all become companions and teachers to Alan, the young son of homesteaders in...

"If Nationality means anything and in the American] case it couldn t mean race it must mean the unconscious response of a people to their natural environment." Mary Austin
Celebrated and controversial author Mary Austin (1866-1934) lived in and wrote about her beloved Southwest, a place that has shaped and been shaped by three distinctive groups: Indian, Spanish, and Anglo. Austin discovered in the Southwest that these cultures blended languages, races, and religions, creating what she believed were unique versions of Catholicism, nature worship, ceremonies, and visions. Those beliefs...

Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating back to the 1900s and before, are now extremely scarce and increasingly expensive. We are republishing these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using the original text and artwork.