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She was "the most peculiar common denominator that society, literature, art and radical revolutionaries ever found in New York and Europe." So claimed a Chicago newspaper reporter in the 1920s of Mabel Dodge Luhan, who attracted leading literary and intellectual figures to her circle for over four decades. Not only was she mistress of a grand salon, an American Madame de Stael, she was also a leading symbol of the New Woman: sexually emancipated, self-determining, and in control of her destiny. In many ways, her life is the story of America's emergence from the Victorian age. Lois Rudnick has written a unique and definitive biography that examines all aspects of Mabel Dodge Luhan's real and ...
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.
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Winner of the 1996 Gaspar Perez de Villegra Award from the Historical Society of New Mexico Mabel Dodge Luhan, hostess and visionary, made Taos, New Mexico, a center for artists and utopians when she moved there in 1917 and began inviting friends to visit her. Now available in paperback, Utopian Vistas is a chronicle of the house Luhan built in Taos and the poets, painters, photographers, film-makers, writers, educators, and visionaries whose lives and works were affected by the house and its environs. Lois Rudnick weaves a complex tapestry depicting American countercultures in New Mexico from the 1920s to the 1990s. "Should be required reading for art historians,film historians, ex-Beats and hippies, their children and grandchildren, and anyone interested in the possibility of making an imperfect America perfect at last."--Karal Ann Marling
The definitive biography of a cultural icon.
In 1917 Mabel Sterne, patron of the arts and spokeswoman for the New York avant-garde, came to the Southwest seeking a new life. This autobiographical account, long out-of-print, of her first few months in New Mexico is a remarkable description of an Easterner's journey to the American West. It is also a great story of personal and philosophical transformation. The geography of New Mexico and the culture of the Pueblo Indians opened a new world for Mabel. She settled in Taos immediately and lived there the rest of her life. Much of this book describes her growing fascination with Antonio Luhan of Taos Pueblo, whom she subsequently married. Her descriptions of the appeal of primitive New Mexico to a world-weary New Yorker are still fresh and moving. "I finished it in a state of amazed revelation . . . it is so beautifully compact and consistent. . . . It is going to help many another woman and man to 'take life with the talons' and carry it high."--Ansel Adams
An examination of the development of Betty Friedan's feminist outlook. Horowitz (American studies, Smith College) looks at Friedan's life from her childhood in Peoria, Illinois through her wartime years at Smith College and Berkeley, to her decade-long career as a writer for two radical labor journals, the Federated Press and the United Electrical Workers' UE News. He argues that this history, combined with the fact that Friedan continued to work on behalf of many social causes after her marriage, contradicts Friedan's claim that her commitment to women's rights grew solely out of her experience as an alienated suburban housewife. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
The seven essays included in this volume move beyond the famed Ashcan School to recover the lesser known work of Robert Henri's women students. The contributors, who include well-known scholars of art history, American studies, and cultural studies demonstrate how these women participated in the "modernizing" of women's roles during this era.
"In the summer of 1929 twenty-three-year-old Miriam Hapgood, who had never been west of New York, came to Taos, New Mexico, to visit Mabel Dodge Luhan. Miriam's parents, Hutchins Hapgood and Neith Boyce, both well-known writers at the time, were old friends of Mabel's. They had sent Miriam to Taos in the hope that it would cure the depression that had plagued her for two years. Miriam responded immediately to this magical place. She spent the summer with Mabel, stayed on into fall, and then persuaded her father to buy her a small house in Taos. In this posthumously published memoir she describes that summer and the next twelve years of her life, during which she married, became a mother, and...
Eva Mirabal (Eah-Ha-Wa, Fast Growing Corn, 1920-1968) studied for six years at the Dorothy Dunn Studio art program in Santa Fe, where she was a favorite of the program's founder and served as an assistant to Dunn's successor, Geronima Montoya (P'Otsunu, 1915-2015, Ohkay Owingeh Pueblo). By the time she was twenty years old, Mirabal was exhibiting in museums and galleries across the country. Mirabal's first exposure to art was through her father Pedro Mirabal who was a popular model, along with Eva's father-in-law Geronimo Gomez, for members of the Taos Art Society and for modern artists who came to Taos as part of Mabel Dodge Luhan's circle. Pedro sat for a bronze bust created by Maurice Ste...