Luhan, Mabel Dodge (1879-1962). American patron of the arts and memoirist. Born Mabel Ganson into a wealthy Buffalo, NY, family, Mabel Evans traveled to Paris, France, in 1904 after the death of her first husband. She met and married Edwin Dodge there and moved with him to a villa in Florence, Italy, where they collected art and Mabel conducted a salon. She moved to New York City in 1912 and separated from her husband soon after (they divorced in 1916). In her Fifth Avenue apartment near Washington Square, she reestablished her salon and supported modern art and radical political causes. Cather may have known Mabel Dodge slightly during her New York year but came to know her better in New Mexico, where she moved in 1917 with her third husband, Maurice Sterne, from whom she divorced in 1922. Mabel married Antonio Lujan, a Taos Pueblo Indian, in 1923. Thereafter she called herself Mabel Dodge Luhan. When Cather and Edith Lewis traveled to New Mexico in June 1925, Luhan invited Cather to visit her in Taos, seeking advice on her manuscript memoirs of her life. Lewis and Cather’s long stay in Taos inspired Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927). Cather briefly returned to Luhan's Taos compound in 1926, when Luhan was absent, and although Luhan invited Cather and Lewis back, they did not return to New Mexico. In 1928, Cather encouraged Alfred Knopf to consider publishing the early volumes of Luhan’s memoirs, praising them as “intensely interesting and alive” (#2589). However, Harcourt Brace published all four volumes of Luhan’s memoirs, Background (1933), European Experiences (1935), Movers and Shakers (1936), and Edge of Taos Desert (1937). Cather also read the later portions in manuscript. Cather praised Luhan’s memoir of D.H. Lawrence during his New Mexico years, Lorenzo in Taos (Knopf 1932), as “the best portrait there ever will be of Lawrence” (#1036). Luhan lived in Taos until her death.

Austin, Mary Hunter (1868-1934). American author and critic. Born in Carlinville, IL, Mary Hunter received a BS from Blackburn College in 1888, the same year she moved with her mother and siblings to California’s San Joaquin Valley. In 1891 she married Stafford Wallace Austin. In 1903, they separated (they divorced in 1915) and her collection of California desert stories, The Land of Little Rain, appeared. Between 1903 and 1924, Austin spent periods of time in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of New York City; London, England; and Carmel, CA; however, most of her literary output continued to focus on the deserts of California and the Southwest. Cather may have met Austin as early as 1910, and Austin’s poetry appeared in McClure’s Magazine in 1911 and 1912. In February 1919 Austin wrote Ferris Greenslet of Houghton Mifflin, their mutual publisher, praising My Ántonia (1918) and asking for additional information and materials to write an appreciation of Cather for El Palacio, a magazine published in Santa Fe, NM; her essay appeared in 1920. When Cather and Edith Lewis travelled to the Southwest in 1925, they saw Austin in New Mexico, where she had built Casa Querida in Santa Fe in 1924. When Cather returned in 1926 to continue research and writing of Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927), Austin offered her the use of her empty house to work in. Cather inscribed a copy of Archbishop “For Mary Austin, in whose lovely study I wrote the last chapters of this book,” but she began denying that she had written any part of the novel in Casa Querida after Austin published Earth Horizon (1932), in which she called Cather’s celebration of French missionary priests a “calamity” for Southwestern culture. Austin died at home two years later.