Mary Austin was an American writer of short stories, essays, novels, plays, and poetry from the 1890s to 1934. Remembered for her focus on the peoples and environments of Southwestern deserts, she is often thought of solely as a regional author, but she was also a part of early twentieth-century New York’s literary scene and the Imagist movement in Modernist poetry.

James Perrin Warren is S. Blount Mason, Jr. Professor of English at Washington and Lee University, USA. He is the author of John Burroughs and the Place of Nature, Culture of Eloquence: Oratory and Reform in Antebellum America, and Walt Whitman’s Language Experiment, and has been published in numerous journals and edited collections.