"American Identities" is a dazzling array of primary documents and critical essays culled from American history, literature, memoir, and popular culture that explore major currents and trends in American history from 1945 to the present.

Mabel Dodge Luhan's Intimate Memories offers the brilliantly edited memoirs 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--among them D. H. Lawrence, Gertrude Stein, and John Reed.

Intimate Memories details Luhan's assemblage of a series of utopian domains aimed at curing the malaise of the modern age and shows Luhan not just as a visionary hostess but as a talented and important writer.

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.

Mabel Dodge Luhan (18791962) was a political, social, and cultural visionary; salon hostess; and collector of genius in almost every field of modernismpainting, photography, drama, psychology, radical politics, social reform, and Native American rights. Luhan spent her adult life building utopian communities, first, as an expatriate in Florence (190512) working to recreate the Renaissance; next as a New Woman in Greenwich Village (191215), hosting one of the most famous salons in American history; and finally, in Taos, the New World (191847), bringing together a community of artists, writers, and social reformers including writers D. H. Lawrence, Jean Toomer, Mary Austin, and Frank Waters; choreographer Martha Graham; and anthropologists Elsie Clews Parsons and John Collier. With Luhan as their hostess, these European and American talents found inspiration in the mesas, mountains, Hispanic villages, and Indian pueblos of northern New Mexico. Modernist works by painters and photographers, including Marsden Hartley, John Marin, Georgia OKeeffe, Ansel Adams, Rebecca Strand, and Paul Strand, are featured alongside indigenous art that inspired their modernist sensibilitiesNative American painters like San Ildefonso Pueblos Awa Tsireh and Taos Pueblos Pop Chalee, whose work Mabel supported, and traditional Hispano devotional art collected by Luhan.