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.'

Winter in Taos (Southwest Heritage)

Biographies & Memoirs

Mabel Dodge Luhan

Community & Culture

Sunstone Press

In September, 1922, the internationally known British writer D. H. Lawrence arrived with his wife, Frieda, at the railroad station in Lamy, New Mexico. They had traveled from Australia to San Francisco, then to Lamy, to come to Taos at the invitation of Mabel Dodge Sterne, later Mabel Dodge Luhan, the patroness of arts and culture in Taos. It was the beginning of an intense, sometimes strained, relationship. Mabel, daughter of a well-to-do Buffalo, New York family, had a long history of cultivating arts and letters, surrounding herself with famous artists and writers in her salons in Florence, Italy and in New York City. She continued her support of literature and the arts in Taos. Lawrence encouraged Mabel to write about her own exciting life and, while back in Italy in 1925, continued corresponding with Mabel and edited manuscripts she sent to him. Her book, "Lorenzo in Taos," is written loosely in the form of letters to and from D. H. Lawrence, Frieda Lawrence, and Robinson Jeffers, the celebrated poet who had been a guest of Mabel's in Taos, with references to Dorothy Brett and Spud Johnson among others. The book is a highly personal and most informative account of an intense relationship with a great writer. It is an important work and its reprinting is welcomed by scholars and those of us who have come increasingly to respect Mabel's contributions in the world of arts and letters through her support of many individuals and her own creative spirit.

Lorenzo in Taos (Southwest Heritage)

Arts & Literature

Mabel Dodge Luhan: In Her Own Words

Palisade Press

This first volume in 1933, of four, of Intimate Memories details incidents that impressed Mabel Dodge Luhan up until she was eighteen. Here she stresses her struggle during childhood and girlhood to become an individual. She says, ''So the houses I have lived in have shown the natural growth of a personality struggling to become individual, growing through the degrees of crudity to a great sophistication and to simplicity.'' This struggle takes place before a Victorian background made up of Buffalo, Lenox, Newport, New York, and Europe where at Bayreuth she wrote that Siegfried Wagner ''...walked aimless here and there, looking like a waxen sketch of his father, melting a little under the sun.'' The various members of the family and the friends are carefully presented from the impressions of the child, who studies each with interest. Her first recollections are of her own home and her parents. Even there she felt the vague discontent that gradually shaped itself into a determination to seek the heights and depths of experience. She records from the shifting scenes of playmates, schools, and gravel, incidents that concern the quaint fashions of the time--bustles, stiffly starched window curtains, sleigh rides, dancing classes, white picket fences--and from these incidents gradually evolves a picture of the town and country life of America during the closing era of the nineteenth century. As salon hostess, writer, and muse, she published her four volumes and 1,600 pages of ''intimate memories'' all 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.

Intimate Memories, Volume One: Background

Intimate Memories, Volume Two: European Experiences

This second volume in 1935, of four, of Intimate Memories details events in Mabel Dodge Luhan's married life and then her experiences in France and Italy, and her many colorful and sometimes sad acquaintances until she finally, seemingly tired of Europe, returns to the United States remarking in the last page, however, that ''...it is ugly in America.'' In this book, in what applies to all four volumes in her memoirs, she arrests the reader with a frankness completely unique to Luhan. Revealing many personal accounts, in her foreword she says, ''What a delicacy one needs to tell a story and at the same time not to tell it.'' And then she says, ''I hope I may be forgiven when I fail.'' Surely she did not. As salon hostess, writer, and muse, she published her four volumes and 1,600 pages of ''intimate memories'' all 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.

"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." Born in 1879 to a wealthy Buffalo family, Mabel Dodge Luhan earned fame for her friendships with American and European artists, writers and intellectuals and for her influential salons held in her Italian villa and Greenwich Village apartments. In 1917, weary of society and wary of a world steeped in war, she set down roots in remote Taos, New Mexico, then publicized the tiny town's inspirational beauty to the world, drawing a steady stream of significant guests to her adobe estate, including artist Georgia O'Keeffe, poet Robinson Jeffers, and authors D.H. Lawrence and Willa Cather. Luhan could be difficult, complex and often cruel, yet she was also generous and supportive, establishing a solid reputation as a patron of the arts and as an author of widely read autobiographies. She died in Taos in 1962.

Winter in Taos

Product Description "An intricate web of dependence, manipulation, and appropriation." - The New Yorker"Second Place owes a debt to Lorenzo in Taos, Mabel Dodge Luhan's 1932 memoir of the time D. H. Lawrence came to stay with her in Taos, New Mexico" - Rachel Cusk"It's the most serious 'confession' that ever came out of America and perhaps the most heart-destroying revelation of the American life-process that ever has or ever will be produced." - D.H LawrenceWritten in direct address to the poet Robinson Jeffers, "Lorenzo in Taos" is dedicated "To Tony and All Indians," but Tony and the Indians are a sideshow. The memoir's raison d'être is the arrival of D.H Lawrence, whom Mabel has mystically "summoned" to Taos to articulate the beauty of the Indian way of life. When Lawrence is keener on depicting Mabel's romance with Tony, she does not object, framing it in symbolic terms. "Of course it was for this I had called him from across the world," she writes, "to give him the truth about America: the false, new, external America in the east, and the true, primordial, undiscovered America that was preserved, living, in the Indian bloodstream." She intends Lawrence to write a parable about her escape from a fallen civilization to an American Eden.From Luhan's first encounter with the Lawrences, which she reports as a "vibratory disturbance," Luhan and Frieda Lawrence are suspicious of one another. After Luhan wears a dressing gown to her first planning session with Lawrence, and listens sympathetically as he gripes about his wife ("the hateful, destroying female"), Frieda bans their one-on-one meetings, and Lawrence's novel is dropped.Their relationship, though, is just getting started. Over the course of "Lorenzo in Taos," Lawrence attends Hopi ceremonies, steals some plausibly-deniable physical contact with Luhan (fingers meeting under soap suds, thighs brushing on horseback), berates Tony, pelts Frieda with stones, and sagely advises Luhan's son to beat his new wife. He and Frieda are in and out of Taos - whenever Lawrence is absent, Luhan feels a "psychic emptiness." She loves him, gives him up, then can't leave him alone. He spreads the rumour that she attempted to seduce him, and promises to "destroy" her, then assures her that she's no longer his enemy, and that, even when she was, he "never really forsook" her. She sends him a letter ending their friendship, because "his core was treacherous." To him, she will always be, in Luhan's words, "that greatest living abomination, the dominating American woman." Review "An intricate web of dependence, manipulation, and appropriation." - The New Yorker"Second Place owes a debt to Lorenzo in Taos, Mabel Dodge Luhan's 1932 memoir of the time D.H Lawrence came to stay with her in Taos, New Mexico" - Rachel Cusk"It's the most serious 'confession' that ever came out of America and perhaps the most heart-destroying revelation of the American life-process that ever has or ever will be produced." - D.H Lawrence"Lorenzo in Taos is packed with good phrases, [Luhan's] insights often have the ring of truth." - Frances Wilson"[Luhan is] a character who is not only a victim or an oppressor but both-a person enmeshed, as many of us are, in an intricate web of dependence, manipulation, and appropriation. This is a Luhan who compulsively confesses, compulsively narrativizes, compulsively lies. It is a troubled Luhan, whose talents are inextricable from her psychological damage. And it is not at all the Luhan who appears courtesy of Rachel Cusk." - Rebecca Panovka, The New Yorker About the Author Mabel Dodge Luhan (1879-1962) was a wealthy American patron of the arts, who was particularly associated with the Taos art colony. In mid--1912, Dodge held a weekly salon in her Greenwich Village apartment - notable guests included Carl Van Vechten, Margaret Sanger, Emma Goldman, Charles Demuth, Big Bill Haywood, Max Eastman, Lincoln Steffens, Hutchins Hapgood, Neith Boyce, and John Re

Lorenzo in Taos: The Inspiration behind Rachel Cusk's international bestseller Second Place (Woolf Haus Classics)

Woolf Haus Publishing

Las Palomas De Taos

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Mabel Dodge Luhan. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Mabel Dodge Luhan

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Mabel Dodge Luhan. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Winter in Taos (Southwest Heritage)

Lorenzo in Taos (Southwest Heritage)

Mabel Dodge Luhan: In Her Own Words

Intimate Memories, Volume One: Background

Intimate Memories, Volume Two: European Experiences

Winter in Taos

Lorenzo in Taos: The Inspiration behind Rachel Cusk's international bestseller Second Place (Woolf Haus Classics)

Winter in Taos