' Austin is credited with 30 book-length works and over 200 novels, dramas, short stories, poems, articles, and essays ? A writer, a feminist and ethnographer who was in advance of her time ? Insights on how California, looked a hundred years ago. Mary Austin is not a household word today, but for much of the early 20th century she was a well-known figure, and one of the few women, who made her way as a writer and chronicler of the West and California. Never on a soapbox, but firm in her convictions she fought the injustice she saw in the treatment of Hispanics and Indians through her work. She is best known for her Land of Little Rain originally published in 1903, a classic nature book that evokes the mysticism and spirituality of the American Southwest