Intimate Memories, the Autobiography of Mabel Dodge Luhan (Abridged) (Paperback)

Mabel Dodge Luhan--salon hostess, writer, and muse--published four volumes and 1,600 pages of "intimate memories" during the 1930s. In vivid and compelling prose, she explored the momentous changes in sexuality, politics, art, and culture that moved Americans from the Victorian into the modern age. Noted for assembling and inspiring some of the leading creative men and women of her day--Gertrude Stein, John Reed, and D. H. Lawrence among them--she was a "mover and shaker" of national and international renown during her lifetime (1879-1962). Lois Palken Rudnick, Luhan's biographer, has abridged the original volumes into one book that highlights Luhan's struggles for self-expression and community: from Gilded Age Buffalo, New York; to Florence, Italy; to radical Greenwich Village in New York; and, finally, to Taos, New Mexico, where she met and eventually married her fourth husband, Antonio Luhan, a Taos Pueblo Indian. This new edition of Luhan's edited memoirs (first published in 1999) contains a new foreword as well as the original introduction. Lois Palken Rudnick is Chair of the American Studies Department at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, and the author of numerous books and essays on New Mexico history and culture including "Mabel Dodge Luhan: New Woman, New Worlds," the award-winning "Utopian Vistas: The Mabel Dodge Luhan House and the American Counterculture," and editor of a recent edition of Alice Corbin Henderson's "Red Earth: Poems of New Mexico."