Mary Hallock Foote (November 9, 1847–June 25, 1938) was a U.S. author and illustrator.
She was born in Milton, New York of English Quaker ancestry. She was educated at the Poughkeepsie, New York Female Collegiate Seminary and at the Cooper Institute School of Design for women, in New York City. She married a mining engineer, Arthur Foote, and subsequently lived in the mining regions of California, Idaho, Colorado and Mexico. 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. Some of her best drawings appear in her own books.
Among her publications are
- Led-Horse Claim : A Romance of a Mining Camp (1883)
- In Exile and Other Stories (1894)
- Coeur d'Alene (1894)
- The Prodigal (1900)
- The Desert and the Sown (fool)
- A Touch of Sun and other Stories (1903), a collection of short stories
- Idaho Stories and Far-West Illustrations
- Royal Americans
- The Valley Road
Wallace Stegner's Pulitzer Prize-winning 1971 novel Angle of Repose is loosely based on Foote's life, and contains passages from her letters. An opera based on the novel was performed in San Francisco in 1976.
A collection of Mary Hallock Foote prints is on permanent exhibit at the Boise Public Library.
