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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 De Wint Foote, and moved to California when he
took a job at the New Almaden mine near San Jose. They subsequently lived in Leadville, Colorado, Deadwood, South Dakota,
Boise, Idaho (where Arthur originated a tremendous irrigation project, later completed by the US government) and then in Mexico
and finally in Grass Valley, California, where Arthur installed the worlds largest Pelton water wheel at the North Star mine
(subsequently becoming the manager of the mine), as Arthur pursued his career. They had three children, a son, Arthur Burling
Foote, and two daughters, Betty and Agnes. Along the way, Mary wrote stories and novels for publication,
usually in The Century Magazine, 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. She
also did commercial book illustrations for various authors. 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 the plot line of MHF's life, as well as uncredited passages taken directly from Foote's letters
caused a significant controversy, which still haunts Stegner's reputation.) 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.
Sample illustrations by Foote
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