Mary Austin

Mary Austin (1868-1934) was an essayist and fiction writer of the American West who chronicled Native American society in the early twentieth century. Her first book, The Land of Little Rain (1903), a collection of sketches of the Southwest and the Native Americans who lived there, was an immediate critical and popular success. She was also an ardent feminist and socialist, and her later works, including A Woman of Genius (1912), reflected her passion for women’s rights.