This passage reveals the basic elements in Austin's regional philosophy. First, there is the individual's emotional response to environment, sometimes so subtle that he doesn't recognize its effect. Second, there is his mystical unity with nature, so intense that the individual becomes the land. Third, there is the individual's use of his environment; he will make it part of his religion, his culture and his daily life.

How did Mary Austin arrive at this romantic, nonintellectual view of man's relationship to his environment? As a little girl, growing up in Carlinville, Illinois in the 1870s she spent a great deal of time playing by herself in the fields and orchards near her home. In her autobiography, Earth Horizon, she recounts her first mystical union with nature:

I had walked down through the orchard alone and come out on the brow of a sloping hill where there was grass and a wind blowing and one tall tree reaching into infinite immensities of blueness. Quite suddenly, after a moment of quietness there, earth and sky and tree and windblown grass and the child in the midst of them came alive together with a pulsing light of consciousness
. . . I in them they in me.

This childhood experience was strengthened by the books she read in adolescence–Hugh Miller's Old Red Sandstone, and Emerson's essays. Miller was Austin's introduction to the processes of the earth, its cycles and patterns. Emerson provided the young woman with a philosophy of nature based on the unity between the natural world and man and on the concept of ethical values that man could learn from nature.

Her personal identification with the natural world was also reinforced by her lonely adolescence. The two members of her family with whom she most identified, her father and her little sister Jenny, died when she was a young girl. Feeling separated from the rest of her family, and alienated from her mother's midwestern values, Mary became more introspective, more self-centered.

At sixteen she entered Blackburn College in Carlinville, but she could not make the psychological adjustment and became ill. When she returned a year later she focused all her attention on the sciences, believing that she could learn about literature and writing on her own.

Looking back on her college education, Austin judged it to have had little effect on her intellectual growth. Her critics agree. Arthur E. Dubois, for example, claims that "Having no science, no literature, nothing European," Austin had to rely on "folk-habit, folk wisdom, folk idealism, folk-method–the American rhythm, as it seemed." And Dudley Wynn explains the basis for her intuitive, emotional approach to ideas: "unlearned, she was scornful of learning. Undisciplined, she was scornful of the meticulous search for truth."

After her graduation, she and her family moved to California's southern San Joaquin Valley. This was a crucial event in Austin's life. The family began their homesteading experiment in 1888, the first year of a three-year drought in the valley. Not only was the desert aridity a psychic shock after the green of Illinois, but the pressures of physical survival made the young woman see nature in a new way. For the first time, she began to understand the realities of man's physical environment; and she began to think about the way man could adjust to his environment.

In her autobiography, she recalls how she spent the days riding and walking across the land, learning about the plants, the animals, meeting the cattlemen and sheepherders who lived on Rancho El Tejon, the immense landholding of Edward Beale. When Mary Austin left the southern San Joaquin four years later, she had written only one published essay, a chronicle of her family's eight-day journey from Pasadena to Beale's property ("One Hundred Miles on Horseback"). But however small in actual literary output, these four years prepared her to be a writer–she now knew a region and its people well enough to recreate it for others.

In 1892, following her marriage to Wallace Stafford Austin, Mary moved to Lone Pine in Inyo County. This was another region which exerted a major influence on her work. She claimed that living in this country and learning its rhythms–"the running of quail, the creaking of the twenty mule team, the beating of the medicine drum"–taught her how to be a writer. Certainly, she did not learn from any other writers, for with the exception of one trip to San Francisco in 1892 to arrange the publication of her first short story, she remained isolated from any literary contacts for the next seven years.

This isolation ended in 1899 when she moved to Los Angeles, where she became part of the literary group led by Charles Fletcher Lummis, editor of The Land of Sunshine. Using his influence and that of other established writers, Mary Austin began to publish in journals such as Atlantic Monthly and Munsey's. Los Angeles also provided the creative stimulus she needed to put her nature experiences into writing: she began The Land of Little Rain.

One of the places Mary Austin recreated in this book was the home she built in Independence, "the brown house under the willow tree by the creek that came down from Kearsarge."For five years, until she and her husband left Inyo for good, she lived here and in Carmel. The Carmel Writers' Colony, which she helped establish, served as a major influence in her writing career. Other members like Jack London, George Sterling, Charles Warren Stoddard and Ambrose Bierce were writers and intellectuals with whom she could exchange ideas, and critical comment, and from whom she could gain a sense of identity as a writer.

Although Mary Austin would not have admitted it herself, the Carmel experience was essential to her growth as a writer. During the twelve years she lived there she produced three of her most important books: The Land of Little Rain (1903), her first and best nature study; The Flock (1906), her memories of sheepherding on El Tejon; and Lost Borders (1909), her collection of tales which show how the land affects and controls man. These books represent the first stage of Austin's work, where the writer explored man's role in nature using her own experiences for imagery and ideas.

After 1912, when Mary Austin was living in New York or traveling in Europe, she turned to the novel as her literary form. The books from this period (1912–1920) reflect a growing feminist awareness stemming from Austin's participation in the Woman's Suffrage movement and in Alice Paul's Women's Political Union. They also reflect Austin's new interest in social issues–man's adjustment to society, rather than his adjustment to nature. This change in theme marks the second stage in Mary Austin's literary development.

In A Woman of Genius (1912) Mary Austin created a character, Olivia Lattimore, whose struggle to have an acting career parallels Austin's struggle to be a writer and a wife and mother. Olivia, like Mary, is only partially successful. In The Ford (1917) Austin combined a major social issue–water and land use–with portraits of four women, each of whom was a type Austin admired. Finally, in her most obvious social protest novel, No. 26 Jayne Street (1920), Austin examined America's reaction to World War I through two main characters–a professional labor organizer and a socialite who tried relief work in Europe in order to "discover America."

All of these novels reveal Austin's concern with how men and women work out their individual and mutual roles in society. Unfortunately, they do not involve the reader, and thus remain abstract polemics. Although the novels from this period were critical failures, their writing allowed Mary Austin to explore the crucial issues of her day and analyze the social systems men create.

This exploration was carried further in the third and final stage of Austin's career when she added society to the equation she had created between man and nature. If we look closely at two works–one from her first years and one from this third period–we can see how Mary Austin developed a regional philosophy which reflected this new balance.

Mary Austin's first book, The Land of Little Rain, established the pattern for all her nature studies. She used the natural world as a model for man to learn from and emulate. She believed that there are three lessons man can take from nature: first, by studying his environment he can recognize the power it exerts over his life; second, by observing how plants and animals survive in a harsh environment, he can learn to adapt to his own environment; third, by studying the example of people who lived close to the land (Indians, miners, sheepherders), he can find ways to live harmoniously–with nature and with other men.

In a land of little rain, man must learn peaceful coexistence with his environment; he "must summer and winter with the land and wait its occasions." This means, according to Austin, that man must accept the physical realities of a semiarid land, drought, sudden violent storms and land with limited uses.

In the chapter titled "My Neighbor's Field," the writer describes a piece of land near her home which was "One of those places God must have meant for a field from all time." She explains how successive groups of people–Indians, cattlemen, sheepherders, and farmers–used the field and how, after each usage, the land reverted to its natural state. Man's impermanence is also emphasized in her chapter on the storms in the High Sierra. They "have habits to be learned, appointed paths, seasons, and warnings, and they leave you in no doubt about their performances. One who builds his house on a water scar or the rubble of a steep slope must take chances."

One way for man to improve his chances is to follow the example of the desert plants which survive by adjusting to the cyclical rainfall.

The desert floras shame us with their cheerful adaptations to the seasonal limitations. Their whole duty is to flower and fruit and they do it hardly or with tropical luxuriance as the rain admits. One hopes the land may breed like qualities in her human offspring.