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Books | Feminism | Writing

Mary Hallock Foote Deserves to Share the Pulitzer Prize with Wallace Stegner

Since he plagiarized “Angle of Repose” from her work

Karen Brenchley
Three-Minute Reads
Published in
4 min readApr 10, 2023

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How would you feel if your story was stolen — and the thief won a prize?

Mary Hallock Foote was an American author and illustrator, born November 19, 1847. By her early twenties she had become established in New York City as an accomplished artist-illustrator for notable publishers there. Then she fell in love with a young mining engineer, Arthur De Wint Foote. They moved across the country to the New Almaden mine just outside San Jose, California.

That was just her first stop in the west. As her husband grew his engineering knowledge, they moved to Leadville, Colorado, then to Deadwood, South Dakota, then to Boise, Idaho (where they spent some time while Arthur originated a major irrigation project on the Boise River), then to Mexico, and finally to Grass Valley, CA, where her husband managed the North Star Mine.

But someone was paying attention

Dr. Mary Ellen Walsh was born one hundred years later, and grew up in Tyler, Texas. After receiving her Ph.D. in English from the University of Arizona she joined the faculty of Idaho State University. Her research specialty was Western American literature.

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Three-Minute Reads
Three-Minute Reads

Published in Three-Minute Reads

Got a minute or three? Short reads for busy folks.

Karen Brenchley
Karen Brenchley

Written by Karen Brenchley

Want to know about AI, ML, or data science? Ask me. I've worked in development in Silicon Valley, & am an aikido nidan, published fiction writer, & MS survivor.

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