Criticism perceives in Mary Austin the certain signs of a power which, 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.