Western Trails: A Collection of Short Stories by Mary Austin

by Mary Hunter Austin (Editor), Melody Graulich (Editor)

Fabulous Collection of collected stories by Mary Hunter Austin (September 9, 1868 – August 13, 1934) 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 Sierras and the Mojave Desert of southern California. For 17 years Austin made a special study of Indian life in the Mojave Desert and her writings reflect this.

309 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1987

About the author

Mary Hunter Austin was a prolific novelist, poet, critic, and playwright, as well as an early feminist, conservationist, and defender of Native American and Spanish-American rights and culture.

After graduating from Blackburn College in 1888, she moved with her family to California and established a homestead in the San Joaquin Valley. She married Stafford Wallace Austin In 1891 and they lived in various towns in California’s Owens Valley before separating in 1905.

One of the early nature writers of the American Southwest, her popular book The Land of Little Rain (1903) describes the fauna, flora and people of the region between the High Sierra and the Mojave Desert of southern California. She said, "I was only a month writing ... but I spent 12 years peeking and prying before I began it."

After visiting Santa Fe in 1918, Austin settled there in 1924. She helped establish The Santa Fe Little Theatre (still operating today as The Santa Fe Playhouse). She was also active in preserving the local culture of New Mexico, establishing the Spanish Colonial Arts Society in 1925.

In 1929, she co-authored a book, Taos Pueblo, with photographer Ansel Adams. It was printed in 1930 in a limited edition of only 108 copies. It is now quite rare because it included actual photographs made by Adams rather than reproductions.

She is best known for her nature classic Land of Little Rain (1903) and her play The Arrow Maker (1911).

Reviews

[Cub Jones · Rating 4 out of 5]

Though her feminism and politics around American Indians are clearly sharper, more nuanced and far more sympathetic than someone like John Ford, and her love for Western geography and landscape and all of the aforementioned is informed by real frontier experience, her sentimentality, muddled, misguided patriotism, and ultimately limited and resigned attitude toward manifest destiny and the violent conquest of the American Indians strongly presage Ford himself, for better and for worse. She may not match his storytelling power, but she nearly makes up for it in her best work with her own unhurried storytelling prowess, her often-evident tenderness towards her characters tempered and balanced through her understanding of the harshness of frontier life, and her use of minutely observed detail. The last in this volume, her unpublished stories, outside of Blue Roses, are both her longest and most dull, and a few others qualify also as dull. However, if the reader is patient and keen to visualize, many of these usually very short stories and sketches offer intimate, quiet rewards--like finding arrowheads or fossils in the desert rocks.