The Ford

"Feminist to the core, . . . over the years Mary Austin produced some skilled and interesting fiction. . . . Her evocative poetic portraits of California and the Southwest . . . are one and all tours de force: prose poems of vision and grace, in which perception, intuition, and mystical insight are realized and presented through metaphor, cadenced language, and exquisite precision of detail."—Kevin Starr,
Inventing the Dream

Library Journal

Austin's political novel offers a fictionalized account of the vicious fights over water rights that bloodied California's early history. It was first published in 1917.

Mary Austin (1868-1934) came to California in 1887 to homestead with her family in Kern County, in the Great Central Valley. She is the author of many novels, essays, and story collections. John Walton, the author of Western Times and Water Wars (California 1992), is Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Davis.