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Le Pays des Petites Pluies
Ce texte de Mary Austin (1868-1934) est l'un des grands classiques de la tradition américaine de nature writing - ce dont témoigne l'existence d'une édition Penguin. Femme de lettres bien connue en son temps, Mary Austin eut une production abondante, comprenant nouvelles, pièces de théâtre, essais féministes ou études sur les Indiens. Mais c'est son premier ouvrage publié, The Land of Little Rain (1903), qui lui a valu une reconnaissance durable, amenant les critiques à comparer sa sensibilité à l'environnement à celles de Henry David Thoreau et John Muir, et son régionalisme littéraire à ceux de Sarah Orne Jewett et de Willa Cather, avec laquelle elle fut liée.
142 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1903
About the author
Mary Hunter Austin
145 books72 followersMary Hunter Austin was a prolific novelist, poet, critic, and playwright, as well as an early feminist, conservationist, and defender of Native American and Spanish-American rights and culture.
After graduating from Blackburn College in 1888, she moved with her family to California and established a homestead in the San Joaquin Valley. She married Stafford Wallace Austin In 1891 and they lived in various towns in California’s Owens Valley before separating in 1905.
One of the early nature writers of the American Southwest, her popular book The Land of Little Rain (1903) describes the fauna, flora and people of the region between the High Sierra and the Mojave Desert of southern California. She said, "I was only a month writing ... but I spent 12 years peeking and prying before I began it."
After visiting Santa Fe in 1918, Austin settled there in 1924. She helped establish The Santa Fe Little Theatre (still operating today as The Santa Fe Playhouse). She was also active in preserving the local culture of New Mexico, establishing the Spanish Colonial Arts Society in 1925.
In 1929, she co-authored a book, Taos Pueblo, with photographer Ansel Adams. It was printed in 1930 in a limited edition of only 108 copies. It is now quite rare because it included actual photographs made by Adams rather than reproductions.
She is best known for her nature classic Land of Little Rain (1903) and her play The Arrow Maker (1911).
After graduating from Blackburn College in 1888, she moved with her family to California and established a homestead in the San Joaquin Valley. She married Stafford Wallace Austin In 1891 and they lived in various towns in California’s Owens Valley before separating in 1905.
One of the early nature writers of the American Southwest, her popular book The Land of Little Rain (1903) describes the fauna, flora and people of the region between the High Sierra and the Mojave Desert of southern California. She said, "I was only a month writing ... but I spent 12 years peeking and prying before I began it."
After visiting Santa Fe in 1918, Austin settled there in 1924. She helped establish The Santa Fe Little Theatre (still operating today as The Santa Fe Playhouse). She was also active in preserving the local culture of New Mexico, establishing the Spanish Colonial Arts Society in 1925.
In 1929, she co-authored a book, Taos Pueblo, with photographer Ansel Adams. It was printed in 1930 in a limited edition of only 108 copies. It is now quite rare because it included actual photographs made by Adams rather than reproductions.
She is best known for her nature classic Land of Little Rain (1903) and her play The Arrow Maker (1911).
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 212 reviews
July 25, 2021
Back in the 20th century, before the world of online booksellers, I learned of a publisher that had a huge catalog of $1 classics. Dover Publications. At that time they were located in Mineola, so I asked Ted to drive me there. He had no interest in books, but he was happy to take me for a drive.
The store was not really what you would call a store. It was a tiny room lined with books. And I was like a kid in a candy store selecting my dollar classics like penny candies. I left there with a bag full of books and on the ride home I started reading The Land of Little Rain.
My relationship with Mary Austin did not end there. The Land of Little Rain piqued my interest in the desert and I went on to read other desert books that I liked even more than Austin’s. Meanwhile I set aside her novel Cactus Thorn halfway through. It put me off starting some of the longer (though thankfully nonfiction) books like The Flock and The Land of Journey's Ending.
But I have an appreciation of Austin that abides. She showed me the beauty of the desert, its flora and fauna, its people, its ambiance, its way of life. She introduced me to the literature of the desert. Would I have read John C. Van Dyke, Joseph Wood Krutch, and Edward Abbey had I not been turned on to the desert by Austin? Probably not.
Perhaps this is why her books have kept their place on my bookshelves and in my heart all these years.
The store was not really what you would call a store. It was a tiny room lined with books. And I was like a kid in a candy store selecting my dollar classics like penny candies. I left there with a bag full of books and on the ride home I started reading The Land of Little Rain.
My relationship with Mary Austin did not end there. The Land of Little Rain piqued my interest in the desert and I went on to read other desert books that I liked even more than Austin’s. Meanwhile I set aside her novel Cactus Thorn halfway through. It put me off starting some of the longer (though thankfully nonfiction) books like The Flock and The Land of Journey's Ending.
But I have an appreciation of Austin that abides. She showed me the beauty of the desert, its flora and fauna, its people, its ambiance, its way of life. She introduced me to the literature of the desert. Would I have read John C. Van Dyke, Joseph Wood Krutch, and Edward Abbey had I not been turned on to the desert by Austin? Probably not.
Perhaps this is why her books have kept their place on my bookshelves and in my heart all these years.
March 23, 2022
Before Mary Austin there were very few people who saw American deserts as a place of life. They only crossed quickly or avoided those places by going around. They saw death instead of life. John Muir came earlier as a naturalist in California but had an easier sell. He stuck with majestic mountains and dramatic trees. The desert just didn’t interest most people.
Mary Austin lived in the Mojave at the time this was published (1903). She was educated but not as a scientist. What she really had was an eye for small things and the connectedness of life. The reader follows her as she gets off her horse and lays down at eye level to a chuckwalla and sticks around long enough to see when the predator comes. Her style is beautiful. You begin to see how different life shows itself at different times of the day. Above all, she points out that it’s a “Land of Little Rain.” Little, but not NO rain. If you follow the creatures and plant patterns there is moisture, even enough to sustain a lost man if he knew what he was looking at. People inhabit Austin’s land too. There are small groups of native people, mining characters, etc.
Water is still the big issue in the West. Problem is, there are too many of us to be supported by “little rain.” Austin would probably be horrified by our encroachment into lands that were obviously fragile even then.
Mary Austin lived in the Mojave at the time this was published (1903). She was educated but not as a scientist. What she really had was an eye for small things and the connectedness of life. The reader follows her as she gets off her horse and lays down at eye level to a chuckwalla and sticks around long enough to see when the predator comes. Her style is beautiful. You begin to see how different life shows itself at different times of the day. Above all, she points out that it’s a “Land of Little Rain.” Little, but not NO rain. If you follow the creatures and plant patterns there is moisture, even enough to sustain a lost man if he knew what he was looking at. People inhabit Austin’s land too. There are small groups of native people, mining characters, etc.
Water is still the big issue in the West. Problem is, there are too many of us to be supported by “little rain.” Austin would probably be horrified by our encroachment into lands that were obviously fragile even then.
February 1, 2022
This 1903 collection of essays about the flora, fauna, and people of the Owens Valley, along the California/Nevada border, reminded me of Henry David Thoreau's Walden and Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker's Creek, but never quite captured me the way they did. Like the prospector Austin charmingly portrays, I found nuggets of great description and anecdote, but I think I might have enjoyed the book more as a text than an audiobook.
June 6, 2019
The author of this short work of non-fiction, Mary Hunter Austin, was one of a number of fascinating women who were writing in California in the early 20th century. Many of them were journalists. Mary Austin was not. She was born in 1868 in Illinois and in 1888 (ten years after the death of her father) moved with her family to the San Joaquin Valley. Following their marriage in 1891 Mary and her husband, Stanford Wallace Austin, lived and travelled in and around Lone Pine, a community situated between the southern Sierra Nevada range and the Mojave Desert.
This was the author’s first and best-known book. Her love of and respect for her adopted home shine through gloriously. Page after page describes in sometimes vivid, sometimes gentle language the beauty that Austin sees in all seasons in the natural environment - mountains, valleys, mesas, desert. She speaks with playful humour and deep respect of the Native American people and the quirky characters who populated these regions in the wake of the Gold Rush.
Austin experiences Life with the keen eye and sensitive emotions typical of the artistic temperament, so it comes as no surprise that, in 1906 (after the death of her child and the disintegration of her marriage) she moved to an artist colony at Carmel-by-the-Sea. Following a sojourn in Europe, when she met feminist activists, her plays and novels became concerned with social and feminist themes.
This book has been my introduction to the work of Mary Hunter Austin, and a very pleasant introduction, to be sure! I look forward to reading her autobiography, Earth Horizon, to learn more about her unconventional life and, of course, to reading more of her many fiction and non-fiction works.
This was the author’s first and best-known book. Her love of and respect for her adopted home shine through gloriously. Page after page describes in sometimes vivid, sometimes gentle language the beauty that Austin sees in all seasons in the natural environment - mountains, valleys, mesas, desert. She speaks with playful humour and deep respect of the Native American people and the quirky characters who populated these regions in the wake of the Gold Rush.
Austin experiences Life with the keen eye and sensitive emotions typical of the artistic temperament, so it comes as no surprise that, in 1906 (after the death of her child and the disintegration of her marriage) she moved to an artist colony at Carmel-by-the-Sea. Following a sojourn in Europe, when she met feminist activists, her plays and novels became concerned with social and feminist themes.
This book has been my introduction to the work of Mary Hunter Austin, and a very pleasant introduction, to be sure! I look forward to reading her autobiography, Earth Horizon, to learn more about her unconventional life and, of course, to reading more of her many fiction and non-fiction works.
February 13, 2019
Another from my Spinners' Wheel list of titles written by California authors from years ago, this is a collection of lovely essays describing the desert country so dear to the author.
The country where you may have sight and touch of that which is written lies between the high Sierras south from Yosemite—east and south over a very great assemblage of broken ranges beyond Death Valley, and on illimitably into the Mojave Desert.
Published in 1903, this book captures the magic of the area, back before modern man had left too much of a dirty footprint there. Austin was observant, respectful of both the country and everything that lived there, and able to bring it all to life. Although I did get lost more than once in the sections that talked mostly about plants. I admire all writers who can identify flowers, shrubs and trees, but it can be confusing if the reader does not recognize all the vegetation by name themselves. I confess I skimmed in a couple of places!
The edition I read at Gutenberg had delicate little sketches throughout the book; they were the perfect complement to Austin's words. The essays were on topics ranging from the plants, animals, and birds of the country to the waterways and people. And one about Jimville, which the author calls a 'Bret Harte' mining town and tells here how it earned its name:
Hear now how Jimville came by its name. Jim Calkins discovered the Bully Boy, Jim Baker located the Theresa. When Jim Jenkins opened an eating-house in his tent he chalked up on the flap, “Best meals in Jimville, $1.00,” and the name stuck.
Here she is talking about the human impact on Nature:
Man is a great blunderer going about in the woods, and there is no other except the bear makes so much noise. Being so well warned beforehand, it is a very stupid animal, or a very bold one, that cannot keep safely hid. The cunningest hunter is hunted in turn, and what he leaves of his kill is meat for some other. That is the economy of nature, but with it all there is not sufficient account taken of the works of man. There is no scavenger that eats tin cans, and no wild thing leaves a like disfigurement on the forest floor.
This is my second title by this author. I first read a short story of hers in The Spinners Book Of Fiction, which led to the creation of the reading list I have been working on lately. She has more titles at Gutenberg, and I will be sure to put them on my Someday Lists!
The country where you may have sight and touch of that which is written lies between the high Sierras south from Yosemite—east and south over a very great assemblage of broken ranges beyond Death Valley, and on illimitably into the Mojave Desert.
Published in 1903, this book captures the magic of the area, back before modern man had left too much of a dirty footprint there. Austin was observant, respectful of both the country and everything that lived there, and able to bring it all to life. Although I did get lost more than once in the sections that talked mostly about plants. I admire all writers who can identify flowers, shrubs and trees, but it can be confusing if the reader does not recognize all the vegetation by name themselves. I confess I skimmed in a couple of places!
The edition I read at Gutenberg had delicate little sketches throughout the book; they were the perfect complement to Austin's words. The essays were on topics ranging from the plants, animals, and birds of the country to the waterways and people. And one about Jimville, which the author calls a 'Bret Harte' mining town and tells here how it earned its name:
Hear now how Jimville came by its name. Jim Calkins discovered the Bully Boy, Jim Baker located the Theresa. When Jim Jenkins opened an eating-house in his tent he chalked up on the flap, “Best meals in Jimville, $1.00,” and the name stuck.
Here she is talking about the human impact on Nature:
Man is a great blunderer going about in the woods, and there is no other except the bear makes so much noise. Being so well warned beforehand, it is a very stupid animal, or a very bold one, that cannot keep safely hid. The cunningest hunter is hunted in turn, and what he leaves of his kill is meat for some other. That is the economy of nature, but with it all there is not sufficient account taken of the works of man. There is no scavenger that eats tin cans, and no wild thing leaves a like disfigurement on the forest floor.
This is my second title by this author. I first read a short story of hers in The Spinners Book Of Fiction, which led to the creation of the reading list I have been working on lately. She has more titles at Gutenberg, and I will be sure to put them on my Someday Lists!
February 1, 2019
3.5/5
Austin's descriptions are appealing enough for me to seriously consider visiting, perhaps even dwell on the idea of moving out to the area for library work, such a landscape that she paints in her pages with its coyotes and its skys and its precious waters, but much of it has likely been "developed" since then, and the scrabble to avoid temperature spikes would get as dreary at times as it did during my Los Angeles schooling days. Still, I won't turn up my nose if a potential job appears in the area of the California/Arizona border and other areas with similar climates. As such, the author's comforting, gorgeous, and at times humorous characterizations make her moments of bigotry all the harder to bear, and fortunately these latter blots are so rare that broad swathes encompassing entire essays/chapters can be read on their own, and the worth of naturalistic appreciation can be maintained without aiding and abetting the genocidal nostalgia that views white civilization as inevitable and the current landscape the fever dream of a disease that must be cured. This is no Silent Spring, but it is an ancestor of the beautiful pictures scattered throughout hard scientific facts of the more recent work, and Austin's concerns with the development of the area mentioned in the Goodreads blurb makes me think there may be a work in her bibliography that is less passive in its observations and does more to call for preservation. This, despite the common myth of the one hit wonder woman author, is far from her only work, and while I have my reservations about her ideologies, other works of hers would be worth picking up if ever I should come across them.
I don't have many nonfiction books concerned with nature on my shelves. The brief tastes that I've gotten make me feel I should remedy that, but so much of what is lauded out there is so consciously, and falsely, apolitical that it wouldn't be worth my time. I've supplemented with 500 Great Books by Women entries thus far, but I'd need to make an effort to look for the sort of explicitly sociopolitically aware/postcolonial/settler state critiquing/feminist/queer analysis of the history of naturalism, and at this point, I don't have the time to do more than browse. Nonetheless, this is a path I'd like to pursue, both in terms of picking up more of Austin's wondrous, if misguided at times, prose and visiting the areas themselves, and it's rather nice to have concrete travel wishes beyond vague pretensions towards various areas of Europe and all that. Sometime in the future, with all the rest of my plans. For now, the weekend awaits.
From the height of a horse you look down to clean spaces in a shifty yellow soil, bare to the eye as a newly sanded floor. Then as soon as ever the hill shadows begin to swell out from the sidelong ranges, come little flakes of whiteness fluttering at the edge of the sand. By dusk there are tiny drifts in the lee of every strong shrub, rosy-tipped corollas as riotous in the sliding mesa wind as if they were real flakes shaken out of a cloud, not sprung from the ground on wiry three-inch stems. They keep awake all night, and all the air is heavy and musky sweet because of them.This is a singular tome that could be better, but it could also be much worse. It is an old one, published just after finale of the anxieties that were the fin-de-siècle, and while Austin's prose is to die for, her title of "mystic" seems at times to amount to little more than racism with a naturalist's hat and a talent for words, most assuredly on paper and perhaps in speech. Nevertheless, I did learn many a thing or two about how the state that I've lived all my life in was at one of its borders with another more than a century ago, and what grew tedious at points with sensationalism was brightened by the variety of the sections and the love, if highly paternalistic and self-satisfied at times, Austin had for the land and its denizens, although she would have done better to not apply her personificating rhapsodizing to the various indigenous nations of the land and instead confined such to the flora and fauna and architectural wonders of rock and wood and water. Nonetheless, I am glad to see that this edition is a reissue, as the transition between the 19th and 20th still doesn't have much of a woman's perspective on the broader writing topics of life such as ecology, and even her anthropology, however, warped, has its uses in the larger scheme of things.
Austin's descriptions are appealing enough for me to seriously consider visiting, perhaps even dwell on the idea of moving out to the area for library work, such a landscape that she paints in her pages with its coyotes and its skys and its precious waters, but much of it has likely been "developed" since then, and the scrabble to avoid temperature spikes would get as dreary at times as it did during my Los Angeles schooling days. Still, I won't turn up my nose if a potential job appears in the area of the California/Arizona border and other areas with similar climates. As such, the author's comforting, gorgeous, and at times humorous characterizations make her moments of bigotry all the harder to bear, and fortunately these latter blots are so rare that broad swathes encompassing entire essays/chapters can be read on their own, and the worth of naturalistic appreciation can be maintained without aiding and abetting the genocidal nostalgia that views white civilization as inevitable and the current landscape the fever dream of a disease that must be cured. This is no Silent Spring, but it is an ancestor of the beautiful pictures scattered throughout hard scientific facts of the more recent work, and Austin's concerns with the development of the area mentioned in the Goodreads blurb makes me think there may be a work in her bibliography that is less passive in its observations and does more to call for preservation. This, despite the common myth of the one hit wonder woman author, is far from her only work, and while I have my reservations about her ideologies, other works of hers would be worth picking up if ever I should come across them.
I don't have many nonfiction books concerned with nature on my shelves. The brief tastes that I've gotten make me feel I should remedy that, but so much of what is lauded out there is so consciously, and falsely, apolitical that it wouldn't be worth my time. I've supplemented with 500 Great Books by Women entries thus far, but I'd need to make an effort to look for the sort of explicitly sociopolitically aware/postcolonial/settler state critiquing/feminist/queer analysis of the history of naturalism, and at this point, I don't have the time to do more than browse. Nonetheless, this is a path I'd like to pursue, both in terms of picking up more of Austin's wondrous, if misguided at times, prose and visiting the areas themselves, and it's rather nice to have concrete travel wishes beyond vague pretensions towards various areas of Europe and all that. Sometime in the future, with all the rest of my plans. For now, the weekend awaits.
Go as far as you dare in the heart of a lonely land, you cannot go so far that life and death are not before you.
May 20, 2019
This is a set of essays unified by their setting in the deserts east of the Sierras at the end of the 19th century. I love this part of California and know a bit about its natural history (well, mostly its flora), but I go there very much as a visitor from a much greener, kinder part of the state. Mary Austin spent much of her life here, and writes intimate snapshots that ramble through the hydrology, botany, geology, and the people that she knew - independent surveyors who followed no laws but their own, indigenous people who knew the desert in ways that are now lost to us. It's a cool glimpse of life in the desert as it was, and even though I don't always care for Austin's value judgments (joshua trees "stalk drearily in the high mesas", buzzards produce a "rare, horrid croak"), a glimpse into how people used to see the desert.
On the other hand, it did take me three months to read about a hundred pages, and I was actually in the desert for part of it. The writing can be ornate and the paragraphs full-page affairs. It's not bad, but I'm not always in the mood for it:
So. Not exactly a page turner. But probably worth reading if you like this part of California and are interested in its history.
On the other hand, it did take me three months to read about a hundred pages, and I was actually in the desert for part of it. The writing can be ornate and the paragraphs full-page affairs. It's not bad, but I'm not always in the mood for it:
There is always a little wind on the mesa, a sliding current of cooler air going down the face of the mountain of its own momentum, but not to disturb the silence of great space. Passing the wide mouths of canyons, one gets the effect of whatever is doing in them, openly or behind a screen of cloud, - thunder of falls, wind in the pine leaves, or rush and roar of rain. The rumor of tumult grows and dies in passing, as from open doors gaping on a village street, but does not impinge on the effect of solitariness.
So. Not exactly a page turner. But probably worth reading if you like this part of California and are interested in its history.
April 29, 2020
Apparently, Austin viewed her writing as the desert equivalent of Thoreau's writing on New England. There are similiarities between the two. There's much in the way of dry description that is not particularly interesting. The writing is void of Muir-like passion, but is interspersed here and there with sentences that leap out as particularly good ("One must learn to spare a little of the pang of inexpressible beauty, not to spend all one's purse in one shop. There is always another year, and another."). Her last chapter, "The Little Town of the Grape Vines" (Las Uvas) is about life in a Mexican town. It is excellent but, notably absent in the other chapters about life on the east side of the Sierras are those features that seem most salient to today's visitor: the dominance of the sun, the cold nights, the vastness, the sense of isolation, the smells, the wind and, in general, the stark beauty.
Addendum (2020): I wonder if this is in New Mexico, as in Sierra de Las Uvas? The cover for this edition has a picture of a saguaro. Austin wrote mostly about the east side of the High Sierras, eastern California where there are no saguaros. The saguaros are only in the Sonoran Desert. It could be that Las Uvas is another place, in the Sonoran Desert of Mexico.
Addendum (2020): I wonder if this is in New Mexico, as in Sierra de Las Uvas? The cover for this edition has a picture of a saguaro. Austin wrote mostly about the east side of the High Sierras, eastern California where there are no saguaros. The saguaros are only in the Sonoran Desert. It could be that Las Uvas is another place, in the Sonoran Desert of Mexico.
December 31, 2015
The writing: pure poetry. Mary Austin's words sing just as brightly more than a century later.
I know there are many, many versions of this volume that are available, but I was lucky enough to read the volume produced in 1903. Inside the dull and worn brown library binding, sits a singular layout, where the 3" x 4" text blocks nestle into the top section of the gutter, leaving a 2"+ U-shaped margin on the sides and bottom of the page sets. And this inviting marginal space is sometimes peppered with sketches of animals, plants, and people who inhabit the west, as Mary Austin knew it. (Why wouldn't it be? The space invites notes and sketches.) When you're really lucky, the sketches nestle around the small text block and complete the page. Then, you have the heavy weight paper. And if you close your eyes and move your fingers across the page, you can feel the thickness of the ink.
This is nearly devolving into book porn, so I'll simply say that I felt privileged to read Austin's words and felt a deeper connection because of the volume where they live.
I know there are many, many versions of this volume that are available, but I was lucky enough to read the volume produced in 1903. Inside the dull and worn brown library binding, sits a singular layout, where the 3" x 4" text blocks nestle into the top section of the gutter, leaving a 2"+ U-shaped margin on the sides and bottom of the page sets. And this inviting marginal space is sometimes peppered with sketches of animals, plants, and people who inhabit the west, as Mary Austin knew it. (Why wouldn't it be? The space invites notes and sketches.) When you're really lucky, the sketches nestle around the small text block and complete the page. Then, you have the heavy weight paper. And if you close your eyes and move your fingers across the page, you can feel the thickness of the ink.
This is nearly devolving into book porn, so I'll simply say that I felt privileged to read Austin's words and felt a deeper connection because of the volume where they live.
July 1, 2011
"Mary Austin was convinced that the valley [Owens Valley*] had died when it sold its first water right to Los Angeles--that city would never stop until it owned the whole river and all of the land. One day, in Los Angeles for an interview with Mulholland, she told him so. After she had left, a subordinate came into his office and found him staring at the wall. "By God, " Mulholland reportedly said, "that woman is the only one who has brains enough to see where this is going." [Cadillac Desert, by Marc Reisner]
Savvy about early 20th century CA water rights and politics and steeped in 19th century Transcendentalism, Mary Austin is best known for these exquisitely written vignettes that describe the landscape and the inhabitants of the Owens Valley. Her lyricism is finely tempered by acute observation. The book closes with an imperative: "Come away, you who are so obsessed with your own importance in the scheme of things, and have got nothing you did not sweat for, come away by the brown valleys and full-bosomed hills to the even-breathing days, to the kindliness, earthiness, ease of El Pueblo de Las Uvas." Come away, indeed.
*[from Wikipedia: "Owens Valley is the arid valley of the Owens River in eastern California in the United States, to the east of the Sierra Nevada and west of the White Mountains and Inyo Mountains on the west edge of the Great Basin section. The mountain peaks on either side (including Mount Whitney) reach above 14,000 feet in elevation, while the floor of the Owens Valley is at 4,000 feet, making the valley one of the deepest in the United States. The Sierra Nevada casts the valley in a rain shadow. The bed of Owens Lake, now a predominantly dry endorheic alkali flat, sits on the southern end of the valley. The valley provides water to the Los Angeles Aqueduct, the source of half of the water for Los Angeles, and is infamous as the scene of one of the fiercest and longest running episodes of the California Water Wars."]
Savvy about early 20th century CA water rights and politics and steeped in 19th century Transcendentalism, Mary Austin is best known for these exquisitely written vignettes that describe the landscape and the inhabitants of the Owens Valley. Her lyricism is finely tempered by acute observation. The book closes with an imperative: "Come away, you who are so obsessed with your own importance in the scheme of things, and have got nothing you did not sweat for, come away by the brown valleys and full-bosomed hills to the even-breathing days, to the kindliness, earthiness, ease of El Pueblo de Las Uvas." Come away, indeed.
*[from Wikipedia: "Owens Valley is the arid valley of the Owens River in eastern California in the United States, to the east of the Sierra Nevada and west of the White Mountains and Inyo Mountains on the west edge of the Great Basin section. The mountain peaks on either side (including Mount Whitney) reach above 14,000 feet in elevation, while the floor of the Owens Valley is at 4,000 feet, making the valley one of the deepest in the United States. The Sierra Nevada casts the valley in a rain shadow. The bed of Owens Lake, now a predominantly dry endorheic alkali flat, sits on the southern end of the valley. The valley provides water to the Los Angeles Aqueduct, the source of half of the water for Los Angeles, and is infamous as the scene of one of the fiercest and longest running episodes of the California Water Wars."]
February 6, 2009
I read this in an English class I'm taking. I gave this book two stars because it is beautifully written and explores a terrain (the California desert) that is utterly foreign to me and that I knew nothing about. It is, however, long-winded and boring, and a mere 110 pages took me over a week to get through. Still, if you like nature writing, it's got merit.
April 25, 2014
I absolutely enjoyed this book in every possible way you can enjoy reading. Each night I treasured the 10 minutes I got (before getting too sleepy) to go back in time to the land and the era she describes. I felt as thought Mary Austin provided a literal time machine for me and all readers, to hop in and get sucked back into the wild nature of Eastern California and Western Nevada as it once were, stark and available and untouched and wild, no pavement, no roads. She describes "the Pocket Hunter", one of my favorite chapters, in exquisite but un-frilly detailed perfection: a description of a traveling, camping, beans-on-the-fire old gold miner. I absolutely treasured each word of her brilliant but not at all overbearing descriptions. Something about her writing had me in love with her. No frills, no TRYING to make things sound better than they are. Just dry honesty, but even with a dry approach the land she is describing, the animals and people she is describing are absolutely captivating. There is no need for her to embark on exaggeration. I absolutely love her way of writing. It took two chapter for me to start falling in love, I must admit I tried to begin this book many times over the course of 2 or 3 years. But once I got into it, I was hooked and I dreaded the book ever ending. In fact, I may just have to go start this one again.
April 16, 2012
Land of Little Rain is Mary Austin's 1903 account of the deserts of the American Southwest. Her text is as spare and secretly seductive as the deserts of which she writes.
Austin lived, for a time, in Independence, CA, until the water literally went south.
Complex woman; complex environment; straight-up text.
Austin lived, for a time, in Independence, CA, until the water literally went south.
Complex woman; complex environment; straight-up text.
March 10, 2016
A Land of Little Rain is an enraptured resident's unsentimental and occasionally spiritual love letter to the vast, pitiless deserts of California and the surrounding High Sierras mountain range.
Mary Austin wrote this book like someone utterly in tune with her chosen home who wants to describe it to you, but not have it explained; at least not with any science, but intuitively, not unlike how a Native American would comprehend and explain it.
More a series of essays than a concerted narrative, through the course of fourteen chapters Austin provides vignettes about the fauna and flora of a mostly uninhabited, inhospitable land; a place of both blazing heat and freezing cold, wind-whipped heights and breathless plains:
'Weather does not happen. It is the visible manifestation of the Spirit moving itself in the void.'
Austin often refers to the smaller animals in anthropological terms as 'furry folks' or 'little people' (e.g. 'Rabbits are a foolish people'), but it's her only concession to sentimentality, if you can it that.
They are generally depicted very much as part of their environment, subject to its laws, to the harsh realities of hunger, drought and nature in tooth in claw.
She has a special love for the coyote, most despised of the local population:
'The coyote is your true water-witch, one who snuffs and paws, snuffs and paws again at the smallest spot of moisture-scented earth until he has freed the blind water from the soil ... goes garrulously through the dark in twenty keys at once, gossip, warning, and abuse.'
On the few human inhabitants of the Land of Little Rain, Austin provides a few short but memorable case studies, starting with the prospecting 'Pocket Hunter':
'a small, bowed man, with a face and manner and speech of no character at all, as if he had that faculty of small hunted things of taking on the protective color of his surroundings'.
With his prehistoric panhandling he harbors hopes of a life of wealth and leisure elsewhere.
Not so Seyavi, the widowed and forsaken indian basket maker who brings up her child alone and against all the odds in such a culture and environment:
'There used to be in the Little Antelope a she dog, stray or outcast, that had a litter in some forsaken lair, and ranged and foraged for them, slinking savage and afraid, remembering and mistrusting humankind, wistful, lean, and sufficient for her young.'
Other chapters provide an insight into a Paiute indian medicine men, Winnenap', who, like all his type, lived and workedin the knowledge that after failing to avert three deaths, he himself must be killed; an episode of frontier myth-making around the hardened residents of Jimville, 'A Bret Harte Town'; and a final glimpse at the Mexican ex-pats of El Pueblo de Las Uvas, celebrating in exile their national holiday on sixteenth of September.
If this choice passage, about Crested Quail at drinking time, captures your ear, you will certainly enjoy the book as much as I did:
'flocks pour down the trails with that peculiar melting motion of moving quail, twittering, shoving, and shouldering. They splatter into the shallows, drink daintily, shake out small showers over their perfect coats, and melt away again into the scrub, preening and pranking, with soft contented noises.'
Mary Austin wrote this book like someone utterly in tune with her chosen home who wants to describe it to you, but not have it explained; at least not with any science, but intuitively, not unlike how a Native American would comprehend and explain it.
More a series of essays than a concerted narrative, through the course of fourteen chapters Austin provides vignettes about the fauna and flora of a mostly uninhabited, inhospitable land; a place of both blazing heat and freezing cold, wind-whipped heights and breathless plains:
'Weather does not happen. It is the visible manifestation of the Spirit moving itself in the void.'
Austin often refers to the smaller animals in anthropological terms as 'furry folks' or 'little people' (e.g. 'Rabbits are a foolish people'), but it's her only concession to sentimentality, if you can it that.
They are generally depicted very much as part of their environment, subject to its laws, to the harsh realities of hunger, drought and nature in tooth in claw.
She has a special love for the coyote, most despised of the local population:
'The coyote is your true water-witch, one who snuffs and paws, snuffs and paws again at the smallest spot of moisture-scented earth until he has freed the blind water from the soil ... goes garrulously through the dark in twenty keys at once, gossip, warning, and abuse.'
On the few human inhabitants of the Land of Little Rain, Austin provides a few short but memorable case studies, starting with the prospecting 'Pocket Hunter':
'a small, bowed man, with a face and manner and speech of no character at all, as if he had that faculty of small hunted things of taking on the protective color of his surroundings'.
With his prehistoric panhandling he harbors hopes of a life of wealth and leisure elsewhere.
Not so Seyavi, the widowed and forsaken indian basket maker who brings up her child alone and against all the odds in such a culture and environment:
'There used to be in the Little Antelope a she dog, stray or outcast, that had a litter in some forsaken lair, and ranged and foraged for them, slinking savage and afraid, remembering and mistrusting humankind, wistful, lean, and sufficient for her young.'
Other chapters provide an insight into a Paiute indian medicine men, Winnenap', who, like all his type, lived and workedin the knowledge that after failing to avert three deaths, he himself must be killed; an episode of frontier myth-making around the hardened residents of Jimville, 'A Bret Harte Town'; and a final glimpse at the Mexican ex-pats of El Pueblo de Las Uvas, celebrating in exile their national holiday on sixteenth of September.
If this choice passage, about Crested Quail at drinking time, captures your ear, you will certainly enjoy the book as much as I did:
'flocks pour down the trails with that peculiar melting motion of moving quail, twittering, shoving, and shouldering. They splatter into the shallows, drink daintily, shake out small showers over their perfect coats, and melt away again into the scrub, preening and pranking, with soft contented noises.'
January 19, 2010
This country is gifted with great writer/naturalists, and Mary Austin is one of the best. The Land of Little Rain is an incredibly poetic collection of little essays on the theme of living in the desert. This is a book that is worth reading several times, not only for the sense of what Austin says, but also how she says it.
February 16, 2010
Mary Austin is an intriguing figure. She was a woman who lived in the California deserts in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, a familiar of salty miners and Paiute maidens, mourned along with cougars who lost their young to cloudburst wreckage, knew the personal legends of sometimes violent men, and watched the desert plants closely.
June 8, 2009
I really enjoyed every word of Austin's. It's a short book, and I was slow-moving to get through it. But I don't regret that. I feel like part of her eyeopening awareness of the natural world speaks to being slow-moving. There's nothing wrong with that. I'm a desert tortoise.
July 9, 2017
Any woman to look old man Mulholland in the face and exposed the truth is alright by me. Rise up Owens Valley take your water back!
September 15, 2021
A short book of essays about life in the desert and the Eastern Sierras of California at the turn of the 20th Century. Austin is a female John Muir. Be ready for botany lessons and interesting observations on Native American culture as well as place and nature. Definitely want to read more of her works. She died in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
July 26, 2023
Aanrader als je geïnteresseerd bent in indianen, natuur en Amerika. Haar liefde voor dit gebied druipt van de pagina’s, erg leuk om te zien, ze schrijft heel poëtisch en beeldend. Al met al een goed boek, maar niet heeeeelemaal mijn ding.
June 3, 2024
Read on my Hwy 395 road-trip, which went right through “the land of little rain.” (In fact, we drove by Mary Austin’s house in Independence, Ca.) It was a lovely to read a little vignette about the place each day. The writing is a little old fashioned and dense to wade through, rambles a bit, and doesn’t connect strongly to recognizable places, but it contains some gems and makes me want to go back and read more thoughtfully.
July 12, 2024
Je ne pensais pas avoir un tel plaisir à lire un livre où il ne se passe strictement rien dans un endroit aride et, à première vue, vide. Mary Austin est une incroyable poétesse et ses descriptions de la vie dans le désert sont imagées et colorées. C’est un plaisir de prendre le temps de lire chacun des chapitres et cela donne envie de revoir les sierras sous un autre angle. Les dessins originaux de Boyd Smith sont un bel ajout et sont en phase avec l’écriture.
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January 17, 2023The prototype for settler desert literature, already in full possession of the craggy poetry and fierce campaigning for oft maligned lands that we've come to expect from writers in this arid canon.
September 26, 2022
The Land of Little Rain composed itself at the time the twentieth century was being born. The archaic poetry in its prose, and the benign prejudices betrayed by a phrase here and there, attest to the fact. But if you are accustomed to reading classic literature of any kind this will not throw you. And this is a classic, and it is indispensable to anyone with more than a passing interest in the American Southwest. I found the last chapter to be the most compelling: speaking of a manner of living simply and appreciatively on the land.
Mary Austin lived for a time in Carmel, California. And I am confident in saying that Carmel is the better for it.
Mary Austin lived for a time in Carmel, California. And I am confident in saying that Carmel is the better for it.
March 24, 2014
The 1950 edition which includes photos from Ansel Adams.
p24. "The Pocket Hunter" " "...a labor that drove him to the use of pack animals to whom thorns were a relish."
P72 "No doubt the labor of being comfortable gives you an exaggerated pain to be set aside."
P103. "Come away, you who are obsessed with your own importance in the scheme of things, and have nothing you did not sweat for ... To the kindliness, earthiness,ease of El Pueblo de Las Uvas."
p24. "The Pocket Hunter" " "...a labor that drove him to the use of pack animals to whom thorns were a relish."
P72 "No doubt the labor of being comfortable gives you an exaggerated pain to be set aside."
P103. "Come away, you who are obsessed with your own importance in the scheme of things, and have nothing you did not sweat for ... To the kindliness, earthiness,ease of El Pueblo de Las Uvas."
January 11, 2023
Austin's classic description of the Mojave Desert from when she lived in Independence around the turn of the 20th century. Beautifully written; made her reputation as a writer. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Hu... for more details of her life and career.
Date first read is just a guess. I've read it at least twice, and will again.
Date first read is just a guess. I've read it at least twice, and will again.
July 5, 2011
This is a book that I return to, again and again. Austin's description of the austere beauty of the Eastern Sierra and Mojave desert and the tough and enduring inhabitants she encountered during her years there is vivid and poetic.
May 12, 2015
Beautiful photography combined with historic writing makes the Mojave desert come alive. I have been in a small part of the Mojave desert in Spring Mountain area . I would like to see more of this great desert.
December 11, 2023
read for a class lol
January 31, 2024
Found this book at an antique shop in Taos and read it while adjusting to my new home in Utah which made it all the more fun to read. In her descriptions of plants, animals, and topography, Austin combines a deep understanding of ecology with an anthropomorphic mysticism to paint a portrait of the Southwest. Her discussion of her Indigenous and Mexican neighbors is at times patronizing but on the whole is far more respectful than was standard in 1903. At one point she actually names racial privilege when talking about the outcome of a court case. This collection of essays deserves a prime spot in the canon of Western American literature.
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