for reasons not entirely clear, has as yet failed to express itself
completely in forms of art. She herself prefers less to be judged by any
of her numerous books than to be regarded as a figure laboring somewhat
anonymously toward the development of a national culture founded at all
points on national realities. Behind this preference is a personal
experience which must be taken into account in any analysis of Mrs.
Austin's work. Born in Illinois, she went at twenty to California, to
live between the Sierra Nevada and the Mohave Desert. There she was soon
spiritually acclimated to the wilderness, studied among the Indians the
modes of aboriginal life, and in time came to bear the relation almost
of a prophetess to the people among whom she lived. Her first book, _The
Land of Little Rain_, interpreted the desert chiefly as landscape. Since
then she has, it may be said, employed the desert as a measure of life,
constantly bringing from it a sense for the primal springs of existence
into all her comment upon human affairs. _The Man Jesus_ examines the
career of a desert-dweller who preached a desert-wisdom to a confused
world. Her play _The Arrow Maker_ exhibits the behavior and fortunes of
a desert-seeress among her own people. _Love and the Soul-Maker_
anatomizes love as a primal force struggling with and through
civilization. From Paiute and Shoshone medicine men, the only poets Mrs.
Austin knew during her formative years, she acquired that grounding in
basic rhythms which led her to write free verse years before it became
the fashion in sophisticated circles and persuaded her that American
poetry cannot afford to overlook the experiments and successes of the
first American poets in fitting expression to the actual conditions of
the continent.

It has been of course a regular tradition among novelists in the United
States to weigh the "settlements" in a balance and to represent them as
lacking the hardy virtues of the backwoods. Mrs. Austin goes beyond this