Mary Hunter Austin

Mary Hunter Austin was an American writer. One of the early nature writers of the American Southwest, her classic The Land of Little Rain (1903) describes the fauna, flora, and people – as well as evoking the mysticism and spirituality – of the region between the High Sierra and the Mojave Desert of southern California.

Mary Hunter Austin was born on September 9, 1868, in Carlinville, Illinois (the fourth of six children) to Susannah (née Graham) and George Hunter. She graduated from Blackburn College in 1888. Her family moved to California in the same year and established a homestead in the San Joaquin Valley.[1]

She married Stafford Wallace Austin on May 18, 1891, in Bakersfield, California. He was from Hawaii and a graduate of the University of California, Berkeley.

For 17 years, Austin made a special study of the lives of the indigenous peoples of the Mojave Desert. Her publications set forth the intimate knowledge she thus acquired. She was a prolific novelist, poet, critic, and playwright, as well as an early feminist and defender of Native American and Spanish-American rights.

Austin died August 13, 1934, in Santa Fe. Mount Mary Austin, in the Sierra Nevada, was named in her honor. It is located 8.5 miles west of her long time home in Independence, California. A biography was published in 1939.