The Land of Little Rain

Ecologist, feminist, and mystic before these terms became popular, Mary Austin knew the desert as few human beings have known it. The Land of Little Rain is an acknowledged classic of southwestern literature. It describes the plant, animal, and human life of the border region of Southern California and Arizona, land of the yucca, the coyote, and the buzzard, inhabited by miners, vaqueros, and Shoshone and Paiute Indians. In The Land of Little Rain, Mary Austin invested the land with magic, and yet looked at it with level eyes, relying upon history and science in her descriptions of her desert and celebrating its human nature with an eloquence which was also analytical.Carl Van Doren