The Ford - Paperback

Mary Austin's 1917 novel illuminates one of the crucial issues in California history--the usurpation of water from the Owens Valley. Ranging from the eastern Sierra to the financial district in San Francisco, the plot portrays the frenzied speculation in land and resources, labor protests, and feminist organizing of the time, exemplified in the successful efforts of an independent young woman to buy back her family's Owens Valley ranch.

Front Jacket

Feminist to the core, . . . over the years Mary Austin produced some skilled and interesting fiction. . . . Her evocative poetic portraits of California and the Southwest . . . are one and all tours de force: prose poems of vision and grace, in which perception, intuition, and mystical insight are realized and presented through metaphor, cadenced language, and exquisite precision of detail.--Kevin Starr, Inventing the Dream