Originally published in 1903, this classic nature book by Mary Austin evokes the mysticism and spirituality of the American Southwest. Vibrant imagery of the landscape between the high Sierras and the Mojave Desert is punctuated with descriptions of the fauna, flora and people that coexist peacefully with the earth. Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.

An appreciation of the Tohono O'odham (long known as the Papago) Indians, whose reservation is the second largest in the United States. "Fontana, who has lived at the edge of the Tohono O'odham (formerly Papago) Reservation for decades, provides sympathetic insight into the history and lifeways of these gentle desert dwellers. Schaefer's photographs, many of them portraits, add timeliness and immediate presence." --Books of the Southwest "An unsurpassed insight into the Papago world, past and present." --Arizona Highways

"Finally, a book that does Mary Austin justice in all her complexity and takes her seriously as a challenging and varied writer."—Melody Graulich, coeditor of Exploring Lost Borders "A wonderful wide-angle view of an era in the American West and its literary, artistic, and anthropological figures."—Robert D. Richardson Jr., author of Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind

In her autobiography, published in 1932, Austin speaks frankly about her life while also commenting on the events and decisions that formed and influenced her life and writing. A prolific writer, she wrote novels, short stories, essays, plays, and poetry. She was an early advocate for environmental issues as well as the rights of women and minority groups.

Seminar paper from the year 2014 in the subject American Studies - Literature, grade: 1,0, Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, language: English, abstract: “In response to the industrial revolution of the late 18th century” (Scheese 6) a new field of literary studies has been established. Derived from former pastoralism, authors now engage into what is called ‘nature writing’. Addressing the concerns of life in the country, attention is directed to the different forms of nature as well. One of these nature writers can be found in Mary Hunter Austin, an American writer who expresses her “affinity for nature, and more particularly the desert” (Scheese 76) by describing the landscape of the Mojave Desert in Southern California the way she perceived it during her walks through it. Austin successfully creates a whole new picture of it in her work "The Land of Little Rain". Through her celebration of a land often perceived as sterile and uninteresting, Austin helped create in America what had not existed before the turn of the century: a desert aesthetic. What Scheese here calls “a desert aesthetic” (Scheese 75) describes the establishment of a literary discourse exclusively centered around literature about the desert. Desert literature itself offers numerous possibilities for writers at the beginning of the twentieth century, especially for female writers as it “inspired cultural fantasies and enabled real and imagined experiences of solitude, comntemplative repose, divine revelation” (Gersdorf 16). As a consequence, the stories of female writers can be understood as symbolic since the action is moved from a former domestic space to the public sphere in form of the desert. This also conforms to the character of the concept of ‘New Womanhood’ which signifies a newly gained freedom for women at the end of the nineteenth century as their determination of staying within the domestic sphere was finally abandoned. To prove this statement, the following essay initially gives a short overview of the literary study of nature writing and its more recent descendant, namely ‘desert literature’. Moreover, the second part of the essay will show how Mary Hunter Austin succeeds in transferring her appreciation of the desert into her short story collection "The Land of Little Rain", where she attributes utopian qualities to the theme of the desert. The third part will finally analyze Austin’s novel with regard to her gender, her concern for nature and the developments concerning the ecofeminist movement at the beginning of the twentieth century.

When The Land of Journeys' Ending was first published in 1924, The Literary Reviewwarned, "This book is treacherous, waiting to overwhelm you with its abundant poetry." In it, successful New York author Mary Austin describes the epic journey she undertook in 1923, when left her East Coast home at the age of fifty-five to travel through the southwestern United States, the area where she lived as a child and where she would later retire. The journey the book describes is a double one. Austin describes her transition from the cosmopolitan North East to the arid and largely unfamiliar land between the Colorado River and the Rio Grande. In telling her own story, Austin also tells the story of those who journeyed there before her--Native American tribes, Spanish conquistadores, miners, adventurers, and California-bound migrants. The result is both an homage to the magnificence of the desert, mountains, rivers, canyons, plants, and animals of the Southwest and a history of the waves of people who inhabited the region. Part memoir, part travel narrative, part historical investigation, and part ecological study, The Land of Journeys' Ending is a moving account of a woman coming full circle, finding solace in the broad landscape of her youth.