Book Description
This digital document, covering the life and work of Mary (Hunter) Austin, is an entry from Contemporary Authors, a reference volume published by Thompson Gale. The length of the entry is 1899 words. The page length listed above is based on a typical 300-word page. Although the exact content of each entry from this volume can vary, typical entries include the following information:

• Place and date of birth and death (if deceased)
• Family members
• Education
• Professional associations and honors
• Employment
• Writings, including books and periodicals
• A description of the author's work
• References to further readings about the author

Book Description
This book was converted from its physical edition to the digital format by a community of volunteers. You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

This is a primary source for feminists
I ordered this book after being assigned excerpts from it in a literature class.The excerpts changed my life.The book was different, but even better than the little bits I had read. It's about the turn of the lastcentury from a woman's perspective.It gave some insights on earlyfeminism and the suffragettes that I had not expected, which werefascinating.I love how she simply tells her story, without propagandizingfor a point. And it was wonderful to read about how my home state,California, looked a hundred years ago.

This book discusses, in verypersonal terms, faith, motherhood, marriage, careers, family, and wonder ofnature.I highly recommend it. ... Read more

Book Description
A significant and innovative contribution to Austinstudies. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

I Mary
Being new to the life and times of Mary Austin, I found this book captivating.Credit goes to Augusta Fink for one of the finest biographies I have ever read. ... Read more

Book Description
Best known for 'The Land of Little Rain,' a collection of natural-history essays about the California deserts, the Western writer Mary Austin (1868-1934) was a prolific literary figure in the first few decades of the twentieth century. In addition to her essays and short stories, Austin produced novels, poems, and cultural criticism, and was well known as a feminist, political writer, and mystic. Over the past decade a number of Austin's books have been reissued and her work has been the subject of increasing critical attention.

Heike Schaefer's study complements that renewed interest with a fresh, broad appreciation of the complexity of Austin's work. Considering unpublished materials and the full range of Austin's literary and theoretical writing, 'Mary Austin's Regionalism: Reflections on Gender, Genre, and Geography' presents Austin as a significant early twentieth-century author who reworked the traditions of nature writing and women's regionalism to envision a sustainable and democratic American culture. Austin brought an environmental awareness to the exploration of the race, gender, and class dynamics informing the European American colonization of the West. Drawing on Southwestern folklore and Native American concepts of storytelling, her work addressed feminist, pluralist, and ecological concerns in often strikingly original ways. By placing Austin's writing in the context of contemporaneous as well as current critical debates, 'Mary Austin's Regionalism' reveals the insights that Austin's work offers to present discussions of sense of place, the construction of human and nonhuman nature, sustainability, feminist politics, and the dynamics of intercultural communication. Mary Austin's decades-old regionalist work still has the power to fascinate and move a wide audience of contemporary readers. ... Read more

Book Description
While many of Mary Austin's stories and essays have been compiled and a number of her novels reprinted, this is the first book-length collection of essays on her work. The editors have created a volume that covers the range of Austin's writing in varied genres-exploring both familiar texts and those which have until now received little critical attention and offering a variety of critical perspectives. Some writers extend the established approaches to Austin's work, such as ecocriticism and feminist criticism. Others rethink and redefine the roles in which Austin has usually been cast. Others read Austin within new theoretical frameworks such as consumer and postcolonial studies. As Graulich says, "Austin herself so resists categorization that most of her critics locate her at the intersection of a variety of perspectives." ... Read more

Book Description
In this brilliant study, Deborah Paes de Barros opens with a powerful analysis of the richness, complexity, and ambiguity of the tropes of travel, the road, frontier, the questing American hero, and the journey as symbolic of male power struggles to control space, time, and borders. Against this dominant male genre of the road novel, Fast Cars and Bad Girls reveals the ways that nomadic female road heroes in the works of women and minoritized writers from Mary Rowlandson to Paula Sharp challennge, resist, and disrupt the hegemonic, patriarchal order. By rejecting the rules of the road, boundaries, and genres, the women writers examined here create nomadic communities of lovers, children, and sisters bonded by love rather than by social conventions and gives us texts that expand the horizons of American fiction. This exciting book opens new territory for the study of American fiction.

Emory Elliott, University Professor, University of California, Riverside, Director, Center for Ideas & Society. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

An Engaging and Wonderful Read
Fast Cars and Bad Girls is both accessible and challenging.The author's obvious passion for her topic is transferred to both text and reader.Strongly recommended to anyone interested. ... Read more

Book Description
The work of three major California writers in the context of the landscapes they loved. John Muir, Mary Austin, and Gary Snyder are perhaps best known for their connection to specific California ecological regions--Muir's Sierra Nevada "Range of Light," Austin's southern "Land of Little Rain," and Snyder's "Kitkitdizze" region of the north. In Reading the Trail, ecocritic and outdoorsman Corey Lewis proposes a provocative new way to read and interpret the classic works of these major nature writers and to bring their ideas into the discussion of ecological values and viable responses to the current environmental crisis.

The literary work of Muir, Austin, and Snyder reflects intimate and passionate knowledge of their chosen regions. Their activist efforts contributed to the preservation of wilderness areas and national parks in the ecosystems they lived in and wrote about. In Reading the Trail, Lewis combines a lucid, perceptive discussion of their work and ideas with an engaging, closely observed account of his own trail experiences as a hiker/backpacker and volunteer trail builder, thereby achieving a new and deeper appreciation of their writing and values. He proposes that such a combination of literary study and experiential projects allows teachers to enrich the understanding of students and lay readers to find new insights into the work of nature writers and the purpose and importance of the environmental movement. The book will be inspiring reading for both teachers of literature and natural science, and for lovers of the outdoors seeking new ways to explore the natural world. ... Read more

Book Description
The Wild and the Domestic provides a challenging look at current feminist criticism as well as ecocriticism and the burgeoning literature of the environment. Barney Nelson, rancher, hunter, and longtime environmentalist, is widely considered one of the most original and innovative scholars at work in the field today. She offers unique views of the "domestic" qualities of many wild animals as well as the wildness in domesticated species often witnessed by those who live close to the land, as she and her family have for generations.

In this provocative work, Nelson focuses on the thought and work of major environmentalists Mary Austin, John Muir, and Edward Abbey. As Nelson says, "Authors of animal stories appearing in both American literature and environmental anti-grazing rhetoric have melodramatically cast domestic animals as female Eden-wreckers and wild animals as male noble savages." This dichotomy influenced political decisions that were destructive to Mary Austin's own rural community, located along the eastern flank of California's Sierra Nevada. The influence of Austin on environmental thinker John Muir has been suggested but not investigated in real depth until now.

Nelson's reading of Edward Abbey's work through the lens of Austin's theories and experiences reveals her surprising influence on an environmentalist held in disfavor by the ecofeminist critics. Nelson's scholarly explorations in this beautifully written and sometimes startling volume are vitally enhanced by several lively and thoughtful personal essays concerning her own life on the land. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

effulgent effluvia of earth
It is not often, in my experience, one has the opportunity to say, "I read the most sharply fascinating book about cows this past weekend." Not that I said this sort of thing after reading this book, but I could have. Barney Nelson performs at minimum two premier services for her readers. First, she reopens the cow case, teasing into gray complexity the traditional assignation of cows to the realm of domestic beasts. Second, Nelson continues a rehabilitation of fame for the early twentieth century writer of the West, Mary Austin.(This rehabilitation comes at the expense of John Muir over the issue of sheep herding and lambing.) Truly, after reading this book I think it is curious that the remarkable Austin is in need of reputation refurbishment in American letters.

The glory continues with the author adding a raucously noble essay on her own life. Nelson also contributes a fine essay on Ed Abbey's reading and suggested usage of Mary Austin's desert book. At last, I mention the political concerns churned up by Nelson's hearty ploughing. Much about land management, grazing rights, and habitat change finds sensible reappraisal. I do not have the expertise or experience to evaluate the suggestions of the author on this matter, but I find her suggestion of interest, that the government policies based on the research programs of some scientists are quite possibly informed by an erring sense of healthy land use and a mistaken foundational origin for the data they interpret. Overall, this book of essays wafts thoughtful chips into the air with relatively little theoretical marsh.

environmentalists ruin the west
This voice is loving if you're a horse, sheep, cow, dog, antelope, sheepherder, or cowperson. But, Goddess help you if you're a mountaineer, hiker, camper, easterner, urbanite, or Sierra Clubber.Perhaps John Muir does need some dethroning, but blame him for the industrialization of Yosemite National Park? Come now.

Domestic vs. Wild -- some new ideas that INCLUDE women
Nelson is a creative thinker and fresh voice injecting new ways of looking at the environment, women's place in nature, and ultimately how to reconcile our dependence upon domestic livestock.By delving into works ofThoreau, John Muir, Jack London, Ed Abbey, and the lone female voice ofMary Austin, Nelson shows how our thinking about the wild, the domesticenvironment, and the place of men and women in both has been shaped byassumptions that are not true. I enjoyed this book very much--there arelots of new ideas to consider, as well as plenty of research to back upNelson's points.She writes clearly and smoothly, and is not afraid totackle ideas that westerners have misunderstood for too long, livestockgrazing for one. I was not at all familiar with the work of Mary Austin,but thanks to Nelson I can see that she should be widely studied for herenvironmental writings, particularly pertaining to women's role. All women,all environmentalists, all westerners, should read Nelson's book, it willbe the basis for many conversations, if not debates. ... Read more