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When I arrived in Santa Fe in the late 1980s, I discovered that I had moved to a region steeped in literary history. For instance, Robert Frost made an extended visit to Santa Fe, staying in La Fonda Hotel, as had Willa Cather when she wrote Death Comes to the Archbishop. Nearby, Cather's friend Mary Austin penned her last novel, Starry Adventure, in her home on Camino del Monte Sol.

Taos also attracted literary giants. D.H. Lawrence lived for a time in the mountains north of Taos at Kiowa Ranch, and his ashes are interred there. Mabel Dodge Luhan, whose Greenwich Village salon was the rival of Gertrude Stein's Parisian one, established her final and most enduring salon in Taos, drawing luminaries like Thornton Wilder, Robinson Jeffers and Tennessee Williams.

Besides Luhan, there were other prewar writers who settled in New Mexico or were born there. Though not as well known as Frost, Lawrence and Wilder, they were nevertheless writers of the same high caliber. Frank Waters, Oliver LaFarge, Fray Angélico Chávez, Erna Fergusson - these and other early 20th century New Mexican authors left a body of work unequaled by any other region of that time.

During the 1980s, I wandered New Mexico seeking out echoes of that lost literary era. On Santa Fe's Buena Vista Street, I would peer up at Witter Bynner's sprawling adobe home, imagining the poet inside wearing his Chinese robes and translating Lao Tzu. In the Taos plaza, I mentally recreated the trial of Frank Samora, the event that inspired Frank Waters' classic novel, The Man Who Killed the Deer. I could picture Spud Johnson standing at his little cart, slender and strange with his sombrero and dangling cigarette, selling copies of The Horse Fly, his one-page newspaper, and Laughing Horse, his literary magazine. As I took my imaginary voyages to New Mexico's literary past, I would wonder, why doesn't someone write a book about this?

Lynn Cline, who had a similar epiphany when she moved to Santa Fe in 1993, has done so with Literary Pilgrims: The Santa Fe and Taos Writers' Colonies - 1917-1950, and the result is a superlative work of literary history.

Cline begins with the Southwest's powerful appeal for any writer with heart and soul. Encompassing centuries of culture - Pueblo, Navajo, Spanish, and American frontier - New Mexico is a mother lode of narrative materials and powerful images. In the early 20th century, it was also place where one could escape America's growing urbanization and conformity. As Cline states, "the writers in northern New Mexico hoped to establish a haven from an industrialized, commercialized American culture they believed to be corrupt and soulless. Santa Fe and Taos seemed ideal locales where writers could achieve this goal." And achieve it they did, forming literary colonies that Cline rightly parallels to those at Carmel, Woodstock, and Provincetown.

As Cline explains, it all began when Alice Corbin Henderson, co-founder of Poetry magazine, came to Santa Fe in 1916 to recover from tuberculosis. She in turn invited Witter Bynner, who was once considered Frost's poetic equal. Meanwhile, in 1917, Mabel Dodge settled in Taos and married Tony Luhan, a Native American from the nearby Pueblo. These three southwestern immigrants would spend the rest of their lives in New Mexico, becoming the nuclei for its literary communities.

Along with chapters on Henderson, Bynner, and Luhan, Cline devotes one each to Austin, Cather, LaFarge, Lawrence, Spud Johnson and Waters. Cline fills these chapters with solid biographical information and fascinating stories, like the time Bynner dumped a glass of beer on Frost's head or the fight between Frieda Lawrence and Mabel Dodge Luhan over D.H. Lawrence's ashes, a fight that ended when Lawrence's widow encased the ashes in a cement altar block. Cline gives briefer portraits of other New Mexican writers - including Pulitzer Prize winner Paul Horgan, Edith Warner biographer Peggy Pond Church, and playwright Lynn Riggs, whose Green Grow the Lilacs inspired Oklahoma!.

Finally, Cline provides tours of literary Santa Fe and Taos so that the reader can enjoy the kind of imaginary journeys that I took 20 years ago.

In her conclusion, Cline states that the New Mexico literary colonies disbanded after World War II. While this is strictly true, contemporary New Mexican authors like John Nichols and Rudolfo Anaya continue the state's literary traditions, and there is a real need for a book covering 1950-2000.

With Literary Pilgrims as an indication of her own authorial strengths, Lynn Cline is clearly the one to write it.

John Nizalowski teaches creative writing at Mesa State College in Grand Junction, Colo. He is the author of Hooking the Sun (Farolito Press) and is currently working on a biography of Frank Waters.