June 25, 1938(1938-06-25) (aged 90) Hingham, Massachusetts
Occupation
Writer, Illustrator
Nationality
American
Education
Cooper Institute School of Design for Women
Spouse
Arthur De Wint Foote
(m. 1876)
Mary Hallock Foote (1847–1938) was an American author and illustrator. She is best known for her illustrated short stories and novels portraying life in the mining communities of the turn-of-the-century American West.
Biography
Overview
Mary Hallock was born November 9, 1847, in Milton, New York, of English Quaker ancestry. A singular girl and youth, she attended the Female Collegiate Seminary in Poughkeepsie, New York, then studied art in New York City at the new Cooper Institute School of Design for Women. By her early twenties she had become established in New York City as an accomplished artist-illustrator for notable publishers there.[1]
Portrait sketch of Mary Hallock Foote, by her daughter, Elisabeth Foote
Arthur and Mary Foote were married nearly sixty years. In the early years of their marriage she gave birth to three children: a son, Arthur Burling Foote, and two daughters, Betty and Agnes.[3]
Career
As a student Mary Hallock Foote befriended American artist Helena de Kay Gilder. The two maintained a very close friendship throughout their lives, shared a lengthy correspondence via letter, and used each other for critiquing their work. Mary Hallock Foote also benefitted from Gilder's husband Richard Watson Gilder, who commissioned her art while he was an editor for Scribner's Monthly. It was through the Gilders that Mary Hallock Foote was also introduced to a circle of fellow artists including, Mary L. Stone, Mary Birney, Maria Oakey, and several popular writers.[4]
After departing her beloved East with great reluctance, Mary Hallock Foote found herself inspired by the "real West" country and the varying peoples she encountered there. She soon was drawing it, and writing and telling about it.[5]
Recording her travels, Foote wrote stories for 'back-East' readers as a correspondent to The Century Magazine and other periodicals, illustrating them with wood engravings made from her drawings. She wrote several novels and is best known for her stories of place, in which she portrayed the rough, picturesque life she experienced and observed in the old West, especially that in the early mining towns.
Mary Foote gained renown as a welcoming and sophisticated hostess to dignitaries and celebrities traveling through the environs of her (successive) homesteads in the West. After 1905, when she and her husband built North Star House (also known as Foote Mansion) and made permanent settlement in Grass Valley, California, she presided for some 30 years over many historic social and civic events there.[1][9]
After her death, Foote fell into obscurity. Thirty-four years after her death, historian Rodman Paul's 1972 edition of Foote's unpublished memoir, A Victorian Gentlewoman in the Far West, helped to spur renewed interest in her life and work.[10] However, her letters—which provide what amounts to a biography of her husband as well as her own autobiography—have never been published except as brief excerpts in various areas of research.
Death and legacy
Mary Hallock Foote died June 25, 1938, at age 90. Her legacy in American history is as a stalwart of the American Old West and a teller of its stories. Her work—the numerous stories for books and periodicals, with her drawings and woodcut illustrations; the correspondence from western outposts; her novels and nonfiction—gained her notice as a skilled observer of the frontier and an accomplished writer. Her life expressed the civilizing influence of the educated eastern gentlewoman on life in the chaotic mining and "ditch" camps (irrigation-project construction camps) of the early American West and, conversely, the stimulating effect of those "old West" environs on the prepared mind, that is, one educated for illustrating and telling the story.
Controversy
Wallace Stegner's novel Angle of Repose (Pulitzer Prize, 1972) is based directly upon Mary Hallock Foote's extensive personal correspondence. Stegner used the outline of her life ostensibly with permission from members of Foote's family—on proviso that he disguise the source, which, in his judgment, he did. After publication, however, some descendants objected to "the great liberties" taken by Stegner in using Foote's story.[1] On the opposite hand, Stegner used passages taken directly from Foote's letters and her reminiscences without providing specific credit; this resulted in controversy that still today haunts his reputation within the literary community.[11][12]
Andrew Imbrie wrote an opera based upon Stegner's novel, which was performed in San Francisco in 1976. A collection of prints by Foote is on permanent exhibit at the Boise Public Library.
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)
The Ground Swell (1919)
A Victorian Gentlewoman in the Far West The Reminiscences of Mary Hallock Foote, edited by Rodman W. Paul, ISBN0-87328-057-1 (1972)
The Idaho Stories and Far-West Illustrations of Mary Hallock Foote, edited by Barbara Cragg, Dennis M. Walsh, and Mary Ellen Walsh. (1988)
^Floyd, Janet. "Mining the West: Bret Harte and Mary Hallock Foote". In Karen L. Kilcup, Soft Canons: American Women Writers. University of Iowa Press, 1999.
^Susan Salter Reynolds (23 March 2003). "Tangle of Repose". Los Angeles Times. Retrieved 15 May 2011.
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, The Bear Deluxe 2003
"Mary Hallock Foote: A Leading Illustrator of the 1870s and 1880s", Sue Rainey, Winterthur Portfolio, Summer/Autumn 2007 (vol. 41, no. 2/3), pp. 97–139.
