Born in Milton, New York, on November 19, 1847, Mary Hallock grew up in a literary home and early displayed artistic talent. She attended Poughkeepsie Female Collegiate Seminary and in 1864╨1867 the women╒s art school of the Cooper Institute in New York City. For several years thereafter she was quite successful as an illustrator for books and magazines, including Scribner╒s Monthly, Harper╒s Weekly, and the Century. In February 1876 she married Arthur D. Foote, a civil and mining engineer with whom she lived thereafter in various mining districts in the West. The colorful scenes amidst which she lived called forth from her pen not only drawings but also written description and eventually fiction. From her years in Leadville, Colorado, came The Led-Horse Claim, published in book form in 1883 after it had been serialized in the Century, John Bodewin╒s Testimony, 1886, and The Last Assembly Ball, 1889. From Boise, Idaho, came The Chosen Valley, 1892, Coeur d╒Alene, 1894, and In Exile and Other Stories, 1894. She and her family then settled in Grass Valley, California.
Subsequent books included The Cup of Trembling and Other Stories, 1895, The Little Fig Tree Stories, 1899, The Desert and the Sown, 1902, A Touch of Sun and Other Stories, 1903, The Royal Americans, 1910, A Picked Company, 1912, The Valley Road, 1915, Edith Bonham, 1917, and The Ground Swell, 1919. As pictures of Western life among miners, Mexicans, and others, her novels and stories, illustrated by herself, rivaled at their best the works of Bret Harte. At the insistence of her various editors, however, she frequently submitted with little resistance to the dictates of Victorian gentility and formulaic fiction and lost much of realism thereby. Her work soon passed out of circulation. Her last years were spent in Hingham, Massachusetts, where she died on June 25, 1938.
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