The Harwood is remounting a small case of Mabel Dodge Luhan's correspondence this fall — letters that once talked a novelist into moving to New Mexico.
Mabel Dodge Luhan settled in Taos in 1917 and spent the next four decades inviting writers and artists to see what she saw in it. D.H. Lawrence accepted an invitation from her and arrived with his wife Frieda in 1922; Georgia O'Keeffe and Ansel Adams passed through the same circle in the years after.
In 1924, hoping to keep the Lawrences in New Mexico, Luhan offered them a 160-acre ranch north of town. Lawrence refused the gift outright — "we can't accept such a present from anybody," he said — but Frieda accepted on one condition: they would give Mabel the manuscript of Lawrence's novel Sons and Lovers in exchange. The deed went in Frieda's name.
A manuscript for a mountainside: the ranch still carries Lawrence's name, decades after the trade that paid for it.