Mary Hunter Austin

At 65 years old, Mary Hunter Austin physical status not available right now. We will update Mary Hunter Austin's height, weight, eye color, hair color, build, and measurements.

She married Stafford Wallace Austin on May 18, 1891, in Bakersfield, California. He was from Hawaii and a graduate of the University of California, Berkeley.

For 17 years, Austin made a special study of the lives of the indigenous peoples of the Mojave Desert. Her publications set forth the intimate knowledge she thus acquired. She was a prolific novelist, poet, critic, and playwright, as well as an early feminist and defender of Native American and Spanish-American rights.

Austin is best known for her tribute to the deserts of California, The Land of Little Rain (1903). Her play, The Arrow Maker, dealing with Indian life, was produced at the New Theatre, (New York) in 1911, the same year she published a rhapsodic tribute to her acquaintance H. G. Wells as a producer of "informing, vitalizing, indispensable books" in the American Magazine.

Austin and her husband were involved in the local California Water Wars, after which the water of Owens Valley eventually was drained to supply Los Angeles. When their battle was lost, he moved to Death Valley, California.

She moved to the art colony at Carmel-by-the-Sea, California about 1907. There Austin was part of the cultural circle that included Jack London, Ambrose Bierce, Harry Leon Wilson, George Sterling, Nora May French, Arnold Genthe, James Hopper, Alice MacGowan, Gelett Burgess, Sinclair Lewis, and Xavier Martinez.

She was one of the founders of the local Forest Theater, where in 1913 she premiered and directed her three-act play Fire. In July 1914, she joined William Merritt Chase, the distinguished New York painter who was teaching his last summer class in Carmel, at several society "teas" and privately in his studio, where he finished her portrait. The well-known artist Jennie V. Cannon reported that he began the painting as a class demonstration after Austin claimed that two of her portraits, which were executed by famous artists in the Latin Quarter of Paris, had already been accepted to the Salon. Apparently, Chase was not deterred by Austin's "pushiness and claims to extra-sensory perceptions", but was more interested in her appointment as director of East Coast publicity for San Francisco's Panama-Pacific International Exposition. On July 25, 1914, Chase attended her Indian melodrama in the Forest Theater, The Arrow Maker, and confessed to Cannon that he found the play dreary. Apparently, Dr. Daniel MacDougal, head of the local Carnegie Institute, paid for most of her production costs, because of his not-so-secret love affair with the writer. When one of Chase's students, Helena Wood Smith, was brutally murdered by her Japanese lover, Austin joined the mob who disparaged local authorities for their incompetence. After 1914 her visits to Carmel were relatively brief.

After visiting Santa Fe in 1918, Austin helped establish The Santa Fe Little Theatre (still operating today as The Santa Fe Playhouse) and directed the group's first production held February 14, 1919, at the art museum's St. Francis Auditorium. Austin also was active in preserving the local culture of New Mexico, establishing the Spanish Colonial Arts Society in 1925 with artist Frank Applegate.

In 1929, while living in New Mexico, Austin co-authored a book with photographer Ansel Adams. Published a year later, the book, Taos Pueblo, was printed in a limited edition of only 108 copies. It now is quite rare because, rather than reproductions, it included photographs made by Adams.

Her home in Santa Fe, at 439 Camino del Monte Sol, is listed on the National Register of Historic Places as a contributing building in the Camino del Monte Sol Historic District.

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