author
Mary Austin
1868–1934
An early voice of the American Southwest, this novelist and essayist wrote with unusual feeling about desert landscapes, Native American life, and the social questions of her time. Her best-known book, The Land of Little Rain, helped turn the region into a lasting subject of American literature.
10 Audiobooks
The Land of Little Rain
by Mary Austin
California: The Land of the Sun
by Mary Austin
The Lovely Lady
by Mary Austin
The Arrow-Maker: A Drama in Three Acts
by Mary Austin
The Land of Little Rain
by Mary Austin
Outland
by Mary Austin
The Basket Woman: A Book of Indian Tales for Children
by Mary Austin
A Woman of Genius
by Mary Austin
The Trail Book
by Mary Austin
The Land of Little Rain
by Mary Austin
About the author
Born in Carlinville, Illinois, in 1868, Mary Austin later moved to California after graduating from Blackburn College. Life in the Owens Valley and the desert country of the Southwest shaped her writing deeply, and she became one of the first major American authors to treat that landscape as something vivid, complex, and spiritually charged.
Austin wrote novels, essays, and plays, but she is most closely associated with The Land of Little Rain (1903), a book that brought together nature writing, observation, and a strong sense of place. She also wrote about Native American communities and wider social issues, which made her work broader than simple regional description.
She died in Santa Fe, New Mexico, in 1934. Today she is remembered as an important early nature writer and as a distinctive literary voice of the American West.