Intimate Memories: The Autobiography of Mabel Dodge Luhan [Illustrated] [Paperback]

Mabel Dodge Luhan (Author), Lois Palken Rudnick (Editor)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 1999

Mabel Dodge Luhan's Intimate Memories, published serially by Harcourt Brace in the 1930s, re-emerges in this brilliantly edited version as a compelling story of one woman's rebellion against the whole ghastly social structure under which the United States had been buried since the Victorian era.

Luhan fled the Gilded Age prison of the upper classes to lead a life of notoriety among Europe and America's leading artists, writers, and social visionaries, and build a series of utopian domains aimed at curing the malaise of the modern age.

Luhan's struggle for self-expression and community took her from stolid Buffalo (1879-1904) to a Medici Villa in Florence (1905-1912), where she reigned as a Renaissance princess with an expatriate community devoted to life for the sake of art; to the radical bohemia of Greenwich Village (1912-1917), where she established the most famous salon in American history; to New Mexico (1918-1962), where she married a Pueblo Indian, and put Taos on the map of the international avant-garde, bringing, among her scores of visitors, D. H. Lawrence, Georgia O'Keeffe, Willa Cather, and Ansel Adams. In prose, paint, poetry, and photography, all of them celebrated her frontier paradise.

Now, forty years after her death, Luhan has found an editor who makes the best of her memoirs available in one abridged 265-page volume. It includes an introduction and a directory of the luminaries who were part of her circle, including Gertrude Stein, John Reed, Margaret Sanger, Emma Goldman, Walter Lippmann, Isadora Duncan, and Alfred Stieglitz.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In the early years of this century, Mabel Dodge Luhan (1879-1962) gathered the foremost artists, philosophers and political radicalsAincluding Gertrude and Leo Stein, John Reed and D. H. LawrenceAto her salons in Florence, Italy, Greenwich Village and Taos, N. Mex. Born into a wealthy but emotionally remote family in Buffalo, N.Y., Luhan's life began in a society she described as "a slaughter of innocents." She believed women were "rarely self-starters," saw marriage as a "passive act" and wrote most passionately about sex, autoerotic or with women. Desperate, self-indulgent, tempestuous, at times profoundly perceptive and always at the edge of revelation, Luhan called herself "a mythological figure right in my own lifetime." She had little interest in her only son (from her first marriage, to Karl Evans, who died in a hunting accident), used "movers and shakers" for her advantage and was given to frequent depressions, which she momentarily alleviated with rounds of malicious gossip or extravagance. In 1917, Mabel Dodge went to New Mexico, where she met Tony Luhan, a Pueblo Indian from Taos whom she had apparently first encountered in a dream some weeks before; he had dreamt about her as well. In Tony and in Taos, Mabel found the balance and completion that had eluded her in previous liaisons, movements and places. The couple lived together until Mabel died, a year before Tony did. At age 45, she began writing her life; this book is a severely abridged edition of the original four volumes spanning 1879-1918. Gossipy, self-serving, at times brilliant, the writing exudes Luhan's feelings of insatiable searching. This is a major film waiting to be made.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About the Author

Lois Rudnick is also the author of Mabel Dodge Luhan: New Woman, New Worlds and Utopian Vistas: The Mabel Dodge Luhan House and the American Counterculture. She is director of the American Studies Program at the University of Massachusetts, Boston.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 320 pages
• Publisher: University of New Mexico Press; illustrated edition abridged edition edition (September 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0826321062
• ISBN-13: 978-0826321060
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.9 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,495,123 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

14 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Mabel Dodge Luhan can speak for herself: The autobiography, May 13, 2003

By 

mary m keyser (sonoma, ca United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Intimate Memories: The Autobiography of Mabel Dodge Luhan (Paperback)

What an outrage and disappointment, this super organized, sanitized act of academic hubris by Rudnick. I suggest you compare this text with the real thing - Edge of Taos Desert to see what I mean. The "Rudnick" autobiography was a total waste of money. I don't think Mabel Dodge Luhan was the kind of woman who would have take kindly to being "abridged." Nor should she have been, when she wrote prose as compelling, honest, sensual and spiritual as found in Edge of Taos Desert. I hope to find an unabridged autobiography. Meanwhile I'm mailing this "autobiography" back to Rudnick.

6 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An extraordinary autobiography not to be missed, January 3, 2001

By 

Debbie Rudnick (Berkeley, CA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Intimate Memories: The Autobiography of Mabel Dodge Luhan (Paperback)

Intimate memories is the autobiography of one of the most fascinating and influential women in artistic and intellectual circles of the US and Europe in the beginning of the 20th century. Mabel's writing is frank and engaging, and her story draws you in like an adventure novel. Her independent spirit and influence on writers, artists and intellectual luminaries of her time are awe-inspiring. This book is well-written and well edited, and I highly recommend it (and Im NOT just saying this because the editor is my mom)!