Mary Hallock Foote
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Mary Hallock Foote (November 9, 1847 – June 25, 1938) was an American author and illustrator.
She was born in Milton, New York, of English Quaker ancestry. She was educated at the Female Collegiate Seminary in Poughkeepsie, New York, and the Cooper Institute School of Design for women, in New York City. She married a mining engineer, Arthur DeWint Foote, and moved to California when he took a job at the New Almaden mine near San Jose. They subsequently lived in Deadwood, Wyoming, and then in Leadville, Colorado and Mexico, as Arthur pursued his career. Along the way Mary wrote stories and novels for publication and illustrated them with her own woodcuts and drawings. She is best known for her stories, in which, as in her drawings, she portrays vividly the rough picturesque life, especially the mining life, of the West.
Wallace Stegner's Pulitzer Prize-winning 1971 novel Angle of Repose is directly based on Foote's letters, later published as the memoir A Victorian Gentlewoman in the Far West. (Stegner's use of uncredited passages taken directly from Foote's letters caused a minor controversy.) An opera based on the novel was performed in San Francisco in 1976.
A collection of prints by Foote is on permanent exhibit at the Boise Public Library.
[edit] Selected works
- Led-Horse Claim : A Romance of a Mining Camp (1883)
- In Exile and Other Stories (1894)
- Coeur d'Alene (1894)
- The Prodigal (1900)
- The Desert and the Sown (1902)
- A Touch of Sun and Other Stories (1903)
- Royal Americans (1910)
- The Valley Road (1915)
- A Victorian Gentlewoman in the Far West: The Reminiscences of Mary Hallock Foote, edited by Rodman W. Paul, ISBN 0-87328-057-1 (1972)
- The Idaho Stories and Far-West Illustrations of Mary Hallock Foote, edited by Barbara Cragg, Dennis M. Walsh, and Mary Ellen Walsh. (1988)
[edit] References
- This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.
- Mary Hallock Foote, James Maguire, Boise State College Western Writers Series Number 2, 1972
- Mary Hallock Foote, Lee Ann Johnson, Twain Publishers, Boston, 1980
- "Angle of Repose and the Writings of Mary Hallock Foote: A Source Study," Mary Ellen Walsh, in Critical Essays on Wallace Stegner, edited by Anthony Arthur, G. K. Hall & Co., pp. 184-209, 1982
- Conversations with Wallace Stegner on Western History and Literature, Wallace Stegner and Richard Etulain, University of Utah Press, Salt Lake City, 1983
- Mary Hallock Foote Author-Illustrator of the American West, Darlis Miller, University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 2002
- Cultural Clearcut: The Lost Novels of Mary Hallock Foote, Casey Bush, Bear Deluxe 2003
