From the 1920s through the 1960s, Reno was the divorce center of the United States. Known as the Colony, Reno attracted the famous and infamous. The literature that emerged from the Colony included informational pamphlets and brochures, magazines, newspaper articles, short stories, poems, approximately two dozen novels, and two plays. With rare exceptions, the literature was genre and pulp fiction—often no more than true confessions or anecdotal storytelling.

Mary Hunter Austin set many of her early stories and novels in the desert and small towns along the eastern slope of the Sierra Nevada Mountains where she lived from 1891 to 1906. From the Great Basin years came Austin's best-known work, The Land of Little Rain (1903), fourteen sketches describing the land and its inhabitants.