Mary Hunter Austin

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Mary Hunter Austin circa 1900
photograph by Charles Fletcher Lummis

Mary Hunter Austin (born September 9, 1868 in Carlinville , Illinois , † August 13, 1934 in Santa Fe , New Mexico ) was an American writer , poet and playwright . She became known primarily as an early theoretician of feminism and as an expert, advocate and literary guardian of the Indian cultural space. The Spanish Colonial Arts Society , which she co-founded in Santa Fe , became one of the most important collections of traditional Native American and Hispanic American folk art in the United States.

Live and act

Early years

Mary Hunter was the second of four children of George and Susannah Savilla (Graham) Hunter. The father, a Yorkshire immigrant , was a lawyer and Civil War veteran with the rank of captain who suffered from malaria and died when Mary was just 10 years old. The mother was of Scottish - Irish - French descent. She had no special relationship with her youngest daughter, ignored the girl and preferred to occupy herself with the other siblings, which is why Mary chose her understanding older sister Jennie as a mother substitute. The girl was hit all the harder when her beloved sister died of diphtheria . So left to her own devices, Mary soon became a loner.

In her later notes, Mary Hunter Austin told of a " spiritual experience" at the age of five through which she created her own "very private" religion. A deep inner voice did "Inknower" , "Genius" or "I-Mary" called. This gift helped her with writing, which she often did in a kind of trance . With the death of her father and sister, the desire to become a writer finally broke out of her and so she began to write her first poems at the age of ten.

In 1884 she began studying art at Blackburn College in Carlinville , but then switched to the natural sciences and humanities, where she graduated in 1888. In the same year she moved to California with her mother and brother Jim, where she settled on a ranch in the San Joaquin Valley . She began teaching children at a school in Mountain View . Austin often withdrew to the desert during this time and spent the nights there. Above all, she treated the non-whites, the Indians and the Chinese workers in the area with friendliness.

In 1890 she met Stafford Wallace Austin (1861–1931), the son of a Hawaiian plantation owner, and fell in love with him. Austin had studied at Berkeley and now worked alternatively as a teacher, winemaker, and property speculator. The two married in Bakersfield in 1891 and moved to Independence in the Owens Valley . Their house in Inyo County , which the two built around 1900, is now one of the United States' National Historic Landmarks .

Unhappy marriage

Mary Hunter Austin's marriage was not very fortunate: in 1892 she gave birth to a mentally handicapped daughter, whom she baptized Ruth and finally gave to a home in Los Angeles , where she died in 1918. At the time, Stafford Austin was managing an irrigation project that failed and caused the young couple significant losses. The dispute eventually led to the so-called California Water War , a dispute between the Owens Valley and the city of Los Angeles over water rights . After the disaster, the couple relied on teaching income again, but Stafford could not find suitable employment. Eventually they parted. Stafford went to Death Valley while Mary moved through some desert towns in California, where she taught at various schools from 1895 to 1899. Meanwhile she tried to make some money by writing. So far she had written short skits and short stories for her students, most of them about the desert and the Indians who live there. In 1892 she had already successfully sold such a short story to Overland Monthly magazine, The Mother of Felipe .

The Land of Little Rain , success as a writer

In 1903 Hunter Austin published her first and best-known book, The Land of Little Rain , which was to become a classic. The book, a collection of 14 essays , is about the Mojave Desert and its inhabitants, the Mohave Indians. Most of the stories are about life and death. Her sudden success as a writer was accompanied by a permanent separation from her husband Stafford, who gave her no intellectual or any other support. She left him between 1903 and 1905, and the divorce followed in 1914.

The contemporary critic Grant Overton (1887–1930) once sketched Mary Hunter Austin from the point of view of a visitor: “Mrs. Austin has an Indian solemnity, a pervasive shyness. Everything she says has a certain value. She rarely speaks. Your utterances are rather slow and most of the time your statements are serious. The desert made them monastic. "

From the beginning of 1904 Mary Hunter Austin lived alternately in Carmel , where she built a house, sometimes in an artist colony there, as well as in Los Angeles or in New York's Greenwich Village . She joined bohemians like Ambrose Bierce , Jack London and George Sterling and initiated one of the first open-air theaters on the west coast with the “ Forest Theater ” in Carmel .

Ansel Adams : Flock of Sheep in the Owens Valley (1941)

With increasing success she began to write a book a year: The Basket Woman (1904) about legends of the Paiute Indians, in the following year the romantic novella Isidro (1905) about Spanish missions in California. One of her most successful works became The Flock (1906), a follow-up to her debut hit The Land of the Little Rain , which is about sheep farmers in the desert of the southwest . In it, she subliminally addressed the incipient abuse and urban sprawl of the country by the Anglo-American settlers.

Her own failed marriage served as a source for another work: In the 1908 novel Santa Lucia , which is about women and marriage, she argues against contemporary conventions , in particular against the taboo that prohibits women from working outside the home and that the husband is responsible for the family's finances, even if he is incapable of doing so.

journey to Italy

In 1910, Austin traveled to Italy after a doctor told her she was going to die of breast cancer . In Italy she studied prayer techniques under the guidance of a clergyman from the Roman Catholic Church. She believed her prayers would cure cancer. Austin continued her writing and she published two works that were directly influenced by her trip to Italy: They were Christ in Italy: Being the Adventures of a Maverick among Masterpieces (1912) and The Man Jesus: Being a Brief Account of the Life and Teachings of the Prophet of Nazareth (1915).

On her return to the United States, she stopped over in London , where she found that she now had a broad readership including George Bernard Shaw , HG Wells and WB Yeats .

Back in the USA, she first visited New York, where preparations for her drama The Arrow Maker were running as a stage play in the New Theater . The play, which is about a Paiute medicine woman, was performed in the spring of 1911. Austin wrote another stage work about the Indians, Fire , which was produced in Carmel in 1912.

From 1912 to 1924 Austin commuted between the east and west coasts of the USA, but she mostly lived in New York during that time. In 1912 she published another novel, A Woman of Genius , which many critics called her best work. The novel, which contains some autobiographical elements, is about a woman who is faced with a choice between marriage and a career. As in many of her women's novels, Austin examines how women are oppressed by men. The book was rediscovered by the women's movement in the 1970s as an early work of feminism.

In the following years, Austin preferred to deal with social issues, as in the more inaccessible works The Ford (1917) and No. 26 Jayne Street (1920). The latter deals with the idea of ​​a marriage of equal partners. The critics received these works rather ambiguously and finally preferred their books about the Indians.

New Mexico, later years

After a nervous breakdown , Austin retired to Santa Fe, New Mexico in 1924, where she built an adobe , an adobe house she called La Casa Querida . In the same year she published The Land of Journeys , a collection of her descriptions of New Mexico and Arizona . From this point in time at the latest, but also through her contact with Mabel Dodge Luhan's artist colony Los Gallos in Taos , the writer became increasingly involved as an activist for the interests of the Native Americans; In addition to the literary processing of Indian cultural assets, she began to collect the Indian folk art . In 1925 she founded the Spanish Colonial Arts Society with the artist Frank G. Applegate .

In 1927 she represented the interests of New Mexico at the Seven States Conference , which dealt with the planned construction of the Boulder Dam (later the Hoover Dam ) and the associated water supply problem.

Ansel Adams: Church, Taos Pueblo (1942)

In later years, Mary Hunter Austin published a variety of different works. In 1928 she created her only collection of poems for children, entitled Sing in the far West . Four years later, she presented her own extensive autobiography, Earth Horizon : In the third person, she reports on her entire life, her unhappy family history, her philosophy and her experiences as well as theoretical aspects of feminism.

In 1929 the nature photographer Ansel Adams and his wife Virginia visited them in Santa Fe. Together they came up with the idea for the Taos Pueblo photo book about the pueblos of the local Indians. Tony Luhan, the husband of Mabel Dodge Luhan, and himself a Pueblo Indian contacted the council of elders of his tribe to get permission to take pictures. The illustrated book Taos Pueblo appeared in the following year 1930 in a first edition of 100 books. Adams photographed several times in Taos in later years. In 1950 he illustrated the reprint of Mary Austin's first work The Land of Little Rain .

In 1934 she published her last work during her lifetime, One-Smoke Stories , a collection of short stories containing Native American sagas and folk tales. Mary Hunter Austin had a heart attack while preparing a new novel. She died shortly thereafter on August 13, 1934. Her ashes were scattered in the mountains of New Mexico.

Significance and aftermath

Despite being a prolific writer, poet, and playwright - she published 32 books and over 250 articles - Mary Hunter Austin was quickly forgotten after her death in 1934. She was only rediscovered by recent literary research and by emancipatory groups as an early social reformer , women's rights activist and advocate for the rights of ethnic minorities , especially the Indian and Hispanic populations of North America.

Most of her writings testify to the intimate knowledge of the Indians and tell of Indian sagas, myths and legends such as the everyday struggle for survival, whereby she also took an unusually critical position for her time with regard to the displacement of the Indian cultural area by white settlers. Furthermore, due to her self-reflection on the role of women in modern society, the writer is considered a pioneer of American women's literature , which was rediscovered and received by the women's movement in the 1970s.

Works (selection)

  • The Land of Little Rain , illustrated by E. Boyd Smith, Doubleday, Page. & Company, New York 1912; New edition Hardpress, 2006, ISBN 1-4069-4208-1
  • The Basket Woman . Houghton, Mifflin & Co., Boston 1901; New edition AMS Press, New York 1969, ISBN 0-404-00429-6
  • Isidro illustrated by Eric Pape, Houghton, Mifflin & Co., Boston 1905
  • The flock . (1906) University of Nevada Press, 2001, ISBN 0-87417-355-8
  • Santa Lucia (1908), Harper and Brothers, London and New York, 1908
  • Lost Borders, the people of the desert . (1909).
  • The Arrow Maker - A Drama in Three Acts Houghton, Mifflin & Co., Boston 1915; New edition AMS Press, New York 1969, ISBN 0-404-00419-9
  • A woman of genius . Doubleday, Page. & Company, New York 1912; New edition Kessinger Publishing, 2007, ISBN 978-0-548-57758-5
  • California: The Land of the Sun illustrated by Harry Sutton Palmer, A. & C. Black, London 1914
  • The Land of Journeys' Ending (1924)
  • Land of the Sun (1927)
  • Taos Pueblo . (1930)
  • Starry Adventure (1931)
  • Earth Horizon - An Autobiography (1932) Afterword by Melody Graulich, University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque 1991, ISBN 0-8263-1316-7
  • One-smoke stories . Houghton, Mifflin & Co., Boston 1934; New edition Swallow Press / Ohio University Press, Athens 2003, ISBN 0-8040-1061-7

A reprint of her first work The Land of Little Rain from 1950 and the first edition of her work Taos Pueblo from 1930 contain photographs by Ansel Adams .

posthumously:
  • Cactus Thorn , the novel written around 1927, was not published until 1988; University of Nevada Press, Reno 1994, ISBN 0-87417-253-5

Stage plays

  • The Arrow Maker premiered in 1911 at New York's New Theater (now the Century Theater )
  • Fire premiered at the Forest Theater in Carmel in 1912

Secondary literature

  • TM Pearce: Mary Hunter Austin . New College & University Press, 1965, ISBN 0-8084-0214-5
  • Augusta Fink: I-Mary: A Biography of Mary Austin . University of Arizona Press, Tucson 1984, ISBN 0-8165-0789-9
  • Esther Lanigan Stineman: Mary Austin: Song of a Maverick . Yale University Press, New Haven 1989, ISBN 0-300-04255-8
  • Melody Graulich, Elizabeth Klimasmith: Exploring Lost Borders: Critical Essays on Mary Austin . University of Nevada Press, Reno 1999, ISBN 0-87417-335-3

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b c Mark T. Hoyer: Mary Austin. In: The Literary Encyclopedia. University of California, June 30, 2002, accessed May 16, 2008 .
  2. ↑ a b c d e f Mary Hunter Austin. In: UXL Encyclopedia of World Biography. BNET.com, 2003, accessed May 15, 2008 .
  3. ^ No. 229 Mary Austin's Home. In: Official web site for CA State Parks. California State Parks, accessed May 15, 2008 .
  4. ↑ Ansel Adams: Autobiography . Christian Verlag, Munich 1985, ISBN 3-88472-141-0 , p. 87 f .
personal data
SURNAME Hunter Austin, Mary
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Hunter, Mary (maiden name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American writer, poet, and playwright
DATE OF BIRTH September 9, 1868
PLACE OF BIRTH Carlinville
DATE OF DEATH August 13, 1934
Place of death Santa Fe (New Mexico)