Author Description

"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.