Lois Palken Rudnick – författare

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 imagined lives, drawing on fictional portraits of Mabel, including those by D. H. Lawrence, Carl Van Vechten, and Gertrude Stein, as well as on Mabel''s own voluminous memoirs, letters, and fiction. Rudnick not only assesses Mabel as muse to men of genius but also considers her seriously as a writer, activist, and spirit of the age.

This biography will appeal not just to cultural historians but to any woman who has loved and lived with men who are artists and rebels. Both as a liberated woman and as a legend, Mabel Dodge Luhan embodies the cultural forces that shaped modern America.

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