1879-1962
Memoirist, Arts Patron, Bohemian

Self-Invention.

In Movers and Shakers (1936), the third book of a four-volume autobiography, Mabel Dodge Luhan described her years in New York City during the 1910s in these words: "in the first place I wanted to know everybody, and in the second place everybody wanted to know me. I wanted, in particular, to know the Heads of things. Heads of movements. Heads of Newspapers. Heads of all kinds of groups of people. I became a Species of Head Hunter, in fact." She also became the best-known hostess in New York's Greenwich Village, which during the 1910s was teeming with artists, writers, intellectuals, and radicals. From the time of Dodge's arrival in the city in 1912 to her departure in 1918, her salon at 23 Fifth Avenue was the gathering place for the intellectual and artistic elite, the most famous salon of its kind in America...