Mabel Dodge Luhan

Internationally known as a writer, hostess, and patron of the arts of the twentieth century, Mabel Dodge Luhan (1879–1962) is not known for her experiences with venereal disease, unmentioned in her four-volume published memoir. Making the suppressed portions of Luhan’s memoirs available for the first time, well-known biographer and cultural critic Lois Rudnick examines Luhan’s life through the lenses of venereal disease, psychoanalysis, and sexology. She shows us a mover and shaker of the modern world whose struggles with identity, sexuality, and manic depression speak to the lives of many women of her era. Restricted at the behest of her family until the year 2000, Rudnick’s edition of these remarkable documents represents the culmination of more than thirty-five years of study of Luhan’s life, writings, lovers, friends, and Luhan’s social and cultural milieus in Italy, New York, and New Mexico. They open up new pathways to understanding late Victorian and early modern American and European cultures in the person of a complex woman who led a life filled with immense passion and pain.

"Mabel Dodge Luhan (1879-1962), the patron of the arts who put Taos, New Mexico, on the cultural map of the world, began to write her autobiography in 1924, a process that took over a decade and resulted in a four-volume opus published serially under the title Intimate Memories. Now almost forty years after her death Mabel has found an editor, and her book is available in one volume for the first time. Abridged and introduced by Rudnick, it is the story of a woman in rebellion against "the whole ghastly social structure" under which she felt the United States had been buried since the Victorian era. Her struggle for self-expression and community took her from Buffalo to Florence to Manhattan to Taos, a journey during which she married four times, ultimately finding happiness with Antonio Luhan, a Taos Indian. Mabel was famous for assembling the movers and shakers of her day, among them such luminaries as D.H. Lawrence, Gertrude Stein, and John Reed, her Greenwich Village lover in bohemian pre-World War I New York. From her childhood as a poor little rich girl to her realization on the last page of Intimate Memories that she could be happy with Tony because the Pueblo people were "not neurotic," Mabel's story is as engrossing as any novel."--Jacket.

xxi, 352 p. : 23 cm

Winter in Taos starkly contrasts Luhan's memoirs, published in four volumes and inspired by Marcel Proust's Remembrances of Things Past. They follow her life through three failed marriages, numerous affairs, and ultimately a feeling of 'being nobody in myself,' despite years of psychoanalysis and a luxurious lifestyle on two continents among the leading literary, art and intellectual personalities of the day. Winter in Taos unfolds in an entirely different pattern, uncluttered with noteworthy names and ornate details. With no chapters dividing the narrative, Luhan describes her simple life in Taos, New Mexico, this 'new world' she called it, from season to season, following a thread that spools out from her consciousness as if she's recording her thoughts in a journal. 'My pleasure is in being very still and sensing things,' she writes, sharing that pleasure with the reader by describing the joys of adobe rooms warmed in winter by aromatic cedar fires; fragrant in spring with flowers; and scented with homegrown fruits and vegetables being preserved and pickled in summer. Having wandered the world, Luhan found her home at last in Taos. Winter in Taos celebrates the spiritual connection she established with the 'deep living earth' as well as the bonds she forged with Tony Luhan, her 'mountain.' This moving tribute to a land and the people who eked a life from it reminds readers that in northern New Mexico, where the seasons can be harshly beautiful, one can bathe in the sunshine until 'untied are the knots in the heart, for there is nothing like the sun for smoothing out all difficulties.'--Amazon.com.

Mabel Dodge first met Gertrude Stein in Paris in 1911 and quickly became an avid promoter of her new style of writing. A charged and intense friendship developed between them. In 1912, Stein wrote "Portrait of Mabel Dodge at the Villa Curonia," and in 1913, at the time of the Armory Show, Dodge wrote an article that introduced Gertrude Stein to America. The dialogue between these two early and influential supporters of modernism communicates vibrantly about new trends in the arts and about personalities of the period. Presented here is the complete correspondence between Dodge and Stein: 105 letters from Dodge to Stein and 30 from Stein to Dodge. With her connective narrative, Patricia Everett re-creates the rise and fall of a remarkable association between two of the century's extraordinary literary figures, their emotional and practical dependence on each other, and the unique ambiance in each of their salons.