Utopian vistas
Subtitle: the Mabel Dodge Luhan House and the American counterculture
By: Lois Palken Rudnick.
Edition: 1st edition.
Publisher: University of New Mexico Press
Published: 1996
Place of publication: Albuquerque
Language: eng
Number of pages: 401
Subjects: Luhan, Mabel Dodge, 1879-1962 -- Homes and haunts -- New Mexico -- Taos; Mabel Dodge Luhan House (Taos, N.M.); Intellectuals -- New Mexico -- Taos; Radicalism -- New Mexico -- Taos; Subculture -- New Mexico -- Taos; Taos (N.M.) -- Intellectual life
Description: 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. Utopian Vistas is a chronicle of the house Mabel Dodge Luhan built in Taos and the poets, painters, photographers, filmmakers, writers, educators, and visionaries whose lives and works were affected by the house and its environs.

Skillfully combining scholarship and a gift for storytelling, author Lois Rudnick weaves a complex tapestry depicting American counter-cultures in New Mexico from the 1920s to the 1990s. Against a backdrop of Southwest scenery, Indian and Hispanic cultures, and expatriate Anglos, the story of the Mabel Dodge Luhan house unfolds from its inception in 1918 to its modern-day incarnation as a center for alternate education. Meticulous architectural descriptions are juxtaposed with insightful comments on the personalities - from D. H. Lawrence and Georgia O'Keeffe to Dennis Hopper and George McGovern - who have owned or visited the Luhan property.

Inter-ethnic strife and ongoing poverty, hippies and Chicano radicals, gifted artisans and doped-up geniuses, mystics and ghosts mingle together in this compelling story of the house that Mabel built.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. [372]-384) and index.
Table of contents: title: Anglo expatriates and the New Mexico landscape; title: Visitors, 1918-1929; title: Visitors, 1930-1950; title: Dennis Hopper and post World War II American culture; title: The great hippie invasion; title: Hopper comes to Taos; title: Legacies of the sixties; title: Las Palomas de Taos.