Mary Austin, The Land of Little Rain

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The Land of Little Rain (1903), a collection of fourteen sketches, is considered by many to be Mary Austin's masterpiece and a classic in the field of American nature writing. Following some minor successes publishing poems and short stories in magazines such as The Atlantic Monthly and The Overland Monthly, Land is Austin's first book-length work, one that allowed her to move at least into the periphery of the national literary scene if not, as Austin hoped, into its center. On the basis of this one book alone, Austin has been compared as an environmental thinker to Henry David Thoreau and John Muir, and as a literary regionalist to Harriet Beecher Stowe, Sarah Orne Jewett, and Willa Cather.

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Citation: Hoyer, Mark T.. "The Land of Little Rain". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 19 June 2003 [https://staging.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=389, accessed 28 March 2024.]

389 The Land of Little Rain 3 Historical context notes are intended to give basic and preliminary information on a topic. In some cases they will be expanded into longer entries as the Literary Encyclopedia evolves.

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