Acknowledged during her lifetime as an important American nature-writer in the tradition of Henry David Thoreau, as a leading feminist theorist, and as an expert on Native American cultures, but largely forgotten after her death in 1934, Mary Austin has received renewed interest over the past few decades due to a unique literary blending of feminism, environmental ethics, social critique, and interpretations and adaptations of Native American, Hispanic-American, and Euro-American mythological traditions.
Born in Carlinville, Illinois, on 9 September 1868, to Susan Savilla Graham, a descendant of town founders, and George Hunter, a Civil War veteran, Mary Hunter, the second of four children, was an imaginative, precocious, curious, somewhat rebellious child. She writes in her autobiography
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Citation: Hoyer, Mark T.. "Mary Austin". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 30 June 2002 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=5029, accessed 21 November 2024.]
