In this arid region Austin witnessed the "long and imperturbable.
In short, is a style capable of representing the reverential awe occasionally inspired in her by the strange beauty of the desert. 5–6, 10–11, 13, 29, 106).Ī third and even more likely source for Austin's discontent with her book is its failure to convey adequately a sense of the "mystical," a sense highlighted in her autobiographical Earth Horizon (1932). Austin, who at one point in her sketches specifically mentions her "poor body," tellingly identifies with the desert terrain as a "lonely land" with "little in it to love"-an "unhappy" place of "lost rivers," "thirsty soil," "demoniac yuccas," "tormented, thin forests," and the "dolorous whine that comes from no determinate point" (pp. A lonely childhood, awkward social interactions, a seemingly unpromising career, chronic illnesses, a mentally challenged daughter, a failing marriage, and a sense of herself as unloved and unlovable all doubtlessly contributed to the book's emotional undercurrents. She was an unhappy person before and during the composition of The Land of Little Rain. The collection had been assembled primarily to earn money, and while the sketches included in the volume all relate to a single geographic region, they read as discrete units lacking a more pleasing principle of integration.Īustin's discontent with her first book may also have been fostered by an intuitive recognition of personal feelings subtly registered below the surface of Authors often come to view their early works with such reservations, but there were good reasons for Austin to be dissatisfied with The Land of Little Rain. AUSTIN'S DISCONTENT WITH THE BOOKĪlthough Austin acknowledged that her collection required more than a year of planning, she was never particularly satisfied with it, at one point even indicating to a friend that its excellent sales conflicted with her own opinion of the book. The reviewer for The Dial was typical in speaking positively, if not especially enthusiastically, about Austin's representation of the desert: "Because she knows and loves it she can reproduce its atmosphere of romance, of silence, and of strangeness" (1 December 1903, pp. The book sold well, its reviewers finding more to praise than to fault. Several of the sketches included in this collection had previously appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, whose editor, Bliss Perry, expedited Houghton, Mifflin's publication of Austin's volume as an illustrated gift book. As a result The Land of Little Rain appealed because it, like precedent books by the naturalists John Burroughs and John Muir, also celebrated a wild environment apparently on the verge of vanishing in a country increasingly defined by technology and urbanization. The conditions of overcrowded urban laborers, generally poorly housed and underpaid despite long work hours, starkly contrasted with the unspoiled nature celebrated by President Theodore Roosevelt when he established national parks as conservational preserves. Nature too was markedly under assault, its resources ruthlessly exploited by corporate giants antagonistic to both governmental regulation and labor unionization. The successful reception of Austin's book was also influenced by various apprehensions defining the opening years of the Progressive Era, a period defined in part by industrial corruption, destabilizing economic speculation, and an anarchist's assassination of President William McKinley in 1901 at the Pan-American Exposition. Such local color interest informs the fourteen sketches that make up The Land of Little Rain, which features the diverse people, animals, and plants found in a stretch of California terrain located between the Sierra Nevada and the Mojave Desert. At a time when the West, the South, and the Midwest still appeared to retain a provincial distinctiveness, East Coast American readers craved both fictional and nonfictional glimpses of the people and customs of these regions. Half of the ten bestsellers in that year-novels by Frank Norris, Thomas Nelson Page, Thomas Dixon Jr., John Fox Jr., and Owen Wister-emphasized regional settings ranging from Virginia and Kentucky to Wyoming. Mary Austin (1868–1934) could not have hoped for a better literary market when The Land of Little Rain, her first book, appeared in 1903.
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