Blending natural history, politics, and allegory, Mary Austin champions local shepherds in the losing battle against the quickly developing tourist business in early twentieth-century California. The Flock is based on Mary Austin's first-hand experiences. She met many shepherds while visiting the Tejon ranches of Edward Beale and Henry Miller and cultivated relationships with men others often thought of as ignorant, unambitious, and dirty, listening closely to their stories. Her neighbors were scandalized, but Austin respected the shepherds' ways of thinking. In The Flock she captures their way of life, not as part of a romantic bygone era, but as exemplifying potentially radical ways of living in and thinking about the world. She blends natural history, politics, and allegory in a genre-blurring narrative championing local shepherds in their losing battle against the quickly developing tourist business in the Western Sierra. Barney Nelson, a rancher, hunter, and environmental activist, is widely recognized as one of the most original voices in environmental literature today. She has enhanced her new afterword with a selection of never-before-published drawings by Mary Austin that were the models for the lovely, authoritative engravings in the first edition, published in 1906. The Flock, readable, informative, and perennially fresh, should bring Austin's work to a broad new audience.

About the Author
Barney Nelson is the author of The Wild and the Domestic, published by the University of Nevada Press (see page 19), as well as a number of other books and many articles. She teaches at Sul Ross State University in Alpine, Texas.

Reviews
"'My sheep book,' Austin called it. Like her other early works - especially The Land of Little Rain, Lost Borders, and Isidro - The Flock explores the interrelationships between landscape and human culture through the portrayal of a particular aspect of Western society. It also represents Austin's effort to rethink and revise the age-old pastoral tradition in an American setting....The Flock is not about Austin, and yet we have such a strong sense of personal presence, in her voice and style, that we are made to think about the way a mind comes to understand and be changed by listening to the stories of 'others' and retelling them. The reader is jolted from a position of passive reception of information into an awareness of the ambiguous creation of meaning." - Melody Graulich, editor of Exploring Lost Borders: Critical Essays on Mary Austin"



Book Information
ISBN 9780874173550
Author University of Nevada Press
Format Paperback
Imprint University of Nevada Press
Publisher University of Nevada Press
Weight(grams) 557g
Dimensions(mm) 204mm * 141mm * 19mm