Abstract

New Mexico was central to the development of American modernism in the 1920s and 1930s, and Laughing Horse magazine documented the distinctive form that modernism took there. Crucial to the arts and literary communities in Santa Fe and Taos, Laughing Horse provided a venue for established writers like Mary Austin and D. H. Lawrence, as well as younger writers like Lynn Riggs and Frank Waters, and the magazine also featured iconic visual images that reinforced the magazine’s regionalist, yet also modernist, aesthetic. This essay argues that Laughing Horse and its network of little magazines are central, rather than peripheral, to modernism.

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