Intimate Memories Background

First edition of Intimate Memories: Background by Mabel Dodge Luhan, the opening volume of her four-volume autobiography. Luhan was born Mabel Ganson in Buffalo in 1879 and grew up among the city’s Gilded Age elite, before becoming one of the more remarkable figures of American modernism: a patron, memoirist, salon hostess, and later a central presence in the Taos art colony. This volume is particularly interesting from a Buffalo standpoint, as Background looks back to her early life: the Delaware Avenue world, family wealth, private education, books, art, and society expectations that helped shape the rebellious personality she later became. A desirable first edition with strong local interest, connecting late-19th-century Buffalo society to the avant-garde worlds of Greenwich Village, Europe, and Taos.