Born in Carlinsville, Illinois, to George and Susanna Savilla Hunter, Mary Hunter graduated from Blackburn College before homesteading with her family in California in 1888. Her years in the desert there led to her first and most successful book, The Land of Little Rain (1903), mystical nature sketches in the Emersonian tradition. After leaving her husband, Stafford Wallace Austin, in 1905 (the couple had married on 19 May 1891), Austin briefly joined artist communities in Carmel, Greenwich Village, and London; but she devoted most of her life and her art to the Southwest, particularly to her beloved New Mexico. The native people of the desert region, their traditions, and their spiritual kinship to the land are her major subjects. She says in her autobiography, Earth Horizon (1932), "I would write imaginatively not only of people, but of the scene, the totality which is called Nature, and ... I would give myself intransigently to the quality...