Author Guide · Art, Letters & Biography
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For her 1976 book about her own work, Georgia O’Keeffe chose a photograph of herself with her back to the camera. She was 88, had lost much of her eyesight, and would refuse to take part in the first biography of her. She published only two books of her own in her lifetime, a small edition of drawings with her notes and the 1976 volume, but she left about 5,000 letters to and from Alfred Stieglitz alone, sealed at her request until 2006. Since her death in 1986 those letters, and the biographers, have filled in what she left out. This guide covers her 11 key books, in order, and where to begin.
By Lisanne Swart · 11 key books · 1974–2011 · Updated October 2026
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Quick answer
Georgia O’Keeffe wrote two books of her own: Some Memories of Drawings (1974) and Georgia O’Keeffe (1976), her self-designed book of more than 100 paintings with her own recollections. Her letters followed after her death, above all My Faraway One (2011), her correspondence with Alfred Stieglitz. Start with the 1976 book; the biographies below show what it leaves out.
Where to Start with Georgia O’Keeffe
If you want her in her own words
→ Georgia O’Keeffe (1976) — her own selection of her paintings, with her notes.
If you want the whole life
→ Georgia O’Keeffe: A Life (1989) — the biography that runs from Sun Prairie to the estate dispute.
If you want the marriage, in letters
→ My Faraway One (2011) — her correspondence with Alfred Stieglitz.
If you want her early drawings
→ Some Memories of Drawings (1974).
11 Georgia O’Keeffe Books, in Order
Some Memories of Drawings
A selection of her major drawings, each with a short comment from O’Keeffe on how, why, where or when she made it. It first appeared from Atlantis Editions in 1974 as a signed limited edition of 100 copies, and the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum calls her text the first writing she meant for book publication. The University of New Mexico Press reissued it in 1988, edited by Doris Bry.
Georgia O’Keeffe
A large book she designed herself for Viking, with more than 100 reproductions of her paintings that she chose, and her own recollections of the works and of events in her life beside them. It is the nearest thing she wrote to an autobiography, and the photograph of herself she chose for it shows her from behind. She was 88 when it appeared and had already lost much of her eyesight.
Georgia O’Keeffe: A Portrait by Alfred Stieglitz
The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s book of the photographs Stieglitz took of her between 1917 and 1933, portraits and nudes alike. O’Keeffe wrote the eleven-page introduction from handwritten notes: “Stieglitz photographed me first at his gallery ‘291’ in the spring of 1917,” she writes, and of seeing the prints, “It is as if in my one life I have lived many lives.”
Portrait of an Artist
The first full-length biography of O’Keeffe, written while she was alive by Laurie Lisle, a former Newsweek journalist, after three years of research and interviews. O’Keeffe refused to take part, so Lisle worked largely from her published words and from the people around her. The Christian Science Monitor called it a “remarkably composite portrait”.
Georgia O’Keeffe: Art and Letters
The catalogue of the National Gallery of Art’s centennial exhibition, which opened in Washington in 1987 and travelled to Chicago, Dallas and the Metropolitan Museum. Besides colour plates of the works shown, it prints more than a hundred of her letters from 1915 to 1981, most never published before, selected and annotated by Sarah Greenough: to Stieglitz, to other artists, and to people such as Sherwood Anderson and Eleanor Roosevelt.
A Woman on Paper
A memoir by her friend from her student days in New York, the woman who in 1916 took O’Keeffe’s charcoal drawings to Alfred Stieglitz. It follows O’Keeffe from her girlhood in Wisconsin and Williamsburg, Virginia, into the 1950s, and was published by Simon & Schuster only after Pollitzer’s death.
Georgia O’Keeffe: A Life
A biography of almost 500 pages by the novelist Roxana Robinson, drawing on sources that only became available after O’Keeffe’s death. It runs from her family’s settlement in Sun Prairie through Stieglitz and New Mexico to her last years with Juan Hamilton and the fight over her estate, and traces her independence to the self-reliant farm women of the Midwest. Kirkus called it the most comprehensive O’Keeffe biography to date.
Lovingly, Georgia
Every surviving letter between O’Keeffe and Anita Pollitzer, edited by Clive Giboire. Most date from 1915 to 1917, when O’Keeffe was teaching far from New York and making the charcoal abstractions that Pollitzer showed to Stieglitz, so the book records the start of her career as it happened.
O’Keeffe and Stieglitz
A dual biography of O’Keeffe and Stieglitz from their meeting in 1916 to their deaths, published by Doubleday. Eisler reads the marriage less as a romance than as a collusion that served both careers, and covers their psychology, their sexual experiments and the art worlds of New York and Taos. Kirkus called it “frank but flawed”.
Full Bloom
A 480-page biography from Norton that divides her life into before, during and after Stieglitz. It argues that O’Keeffe’s own account of a happy, independent youth hides a difficult adolescence and early adulthood, and draws on sources earlier biographers had not used.
My Faraway One
O’Keeffe and Stieglitz exchanged about 5,000 letters, and at her request the correspondence stayed sealed until 2006. Sarah Greenough chose about 650 of them for this first volume, from 1915 through the marriage in 1924 to the strains around O’Keeffe’s first summer in New Mexico in 1929. Her side ranges from jokes to “I am as sure of it as I am that I have a right hand.”
In What Order to Read Georgia O’Keeffe
There is no series here. Her own books are short and visual and can be read in any order; the letters and biographies are best read once you know the paintings, because they keep referring to them.
A useful sequence is to read her own account first, then a biography, then the letters, which let you check both. Lisle’s 1980 biography was written without her help and Robinson’s 1989 book with material released after her death, so the later biographies know more.
A reading path
1. Georgia O’Keeffe (1976)
2. Georgia O’Keeffe: A Portrait by Alfred Stieglitz (1978)
3. Georgia O’Keeffe: A Life (1989)
4. My Faraway One (2011)
Everything Else by and about Georgia O’Keeffe
Beyond the 11 key books: 4 more, grouped by kind.
Open a group with the + to see every book in it.
More letters
2
2 books · 2003–2020
- 2003Maria Chabot–Georgia O’Keeffe: Correspondence, 1941–1949letters about northern New Mexico and the rebuilding of her house in Abiquiú
- 2020Georgia O’Keeffe’s Wartime Texas Lettersher letters from Amarillo and Canyon, Texas, 1912–1918, presented by Amy Von Lintel
More books about her
2
2 books · 2000–2018
- 2000Carr, O’Keeffe, Kahlo: Places of Their OwnEmily Carr, O’Keeffe and Frida Kahlo compared
- 2018Ida O’Keeffe: Escaping Georgia’s Shadowon her younger sister, also a painter
The years · 1887–1986
Quick facts about Georgia O’Keeffe
- Known for
- She was the American painter of enlarged flowers, New York skyscrapers and the bones and hills of New Mexico who became one of the defining figures of American modernism.
- 1887
- Born in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin
- 1916
- Stieglitz first shows her drawings at 291
- 1929
- First summer in New Mexico
- 1949
- Moves to New Mexico for good
- 1976
- Georgia O’Keeffe
- 1986
- Dies in Santa Fe, aged 98
- Born
- 15 November 1887, on a farm near Sun Prairie, Wisconsin
- Died
- 6 March 1986, Santa Fe, New Mexico, aged 98
- Studied
- School of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Art Students League in New York, and Teachers College, Columbia
- Married
- The photographer and gallerist Alfred Stieglitz, in 1924; he died in 1946
- New Mexico
- Ghost Ranch from the 1930s, a house in Abiquiú bought in 1945, settled there for good in 1949
- Honours
- Presidential Medal of Freedom (1977) and National Medal of Arts (1985)
- Museum
- The Georgia O’Keeffe Museum opened in Santa Fe in 1997
The red mark is 1976: Georgia O’Keeffe, the book in which she presented her own work in her own words.
How Georgia O’Keeffe Writes: Few Words, Chosen Like Shapes
O’Keeffe distrusted words as a medium. “The meaning of a word—to me—is not as exact as the meaning of a color,” she wrote in 1976, and her books keep the text short: a few lines beside each drawing in Some Memories of Drawings, brief recollections beside each plate in the 1976 volume. As early as 1922 she wrote that “it is only by selection, by elimination, and by emphasis that we get at the real meaning of things,” and her prose works the same way.
Her letters are a different voice: fast, full of dashes, teasing and direct. To Stieglitz she could write “There little boy don’t get so excited — don’t bank on me — I’m only a woman”; from Texas she wrote that “The country is almost all sky — and such wonderful sky.” Because they were sealed until 2006, much of this voice has only reached readers in the last twenty years.
She also wrote to control how she was read. She rejected the sexual readings critics gave her flower paintings, saying that people who read erotic symbols into them were “really talking about their own affairs”, and refused to cooperate with her first biographer. The books about her are, in part, arguments with the story she told.
Frequently asked questions about Georgia O’Keeffe’s books
How many books has Georgia O’Keeffe written?
Two books of her own: Some Memories of Drawings (1974) and Georgia O’Keeffe (1976). She also wrote the introduction to Georgia O’Keeffe: A Portrait by Alfred Stieglitz (1978). Her letters have since been published in several collections, including Art and Letters (1987), Lovingly, Georgia (1990) and My Faraway One (2011). This page lists 11 key books by and about her.
What are Georgia O’Keeffe’s books in order?
Some Memories of Drawings (1974), Georgia O’Keeffe (1976), Georgia O’Keeffe: A Portrait by Alfred Stieglitz (1978, with her introduction), then her letters: Georgia O’Keeffe: Art and Letters (1987), Lovingly, Georgia (1990), Maria Chabot–Georgia O’Keeffe: Correspondence (2003), My Faraway One (2011) and Georgia O’Keeffe’s Wartime Texas Letters (2020).
Where should I start with Georgia O’Keeffe?
With Georgia O’Keeffe (1976), the book she designed herself, with more than 100 of her paintings and her own notes on them. For her life, follow it with Roxana Robinson’s Georgia O’Keeffe: A Life (1989).
What is Georgia O’Keeffe’s most famous book?
Georgia O’Keeffe (1976), published by Viking when she was 88. It is the only full account of her work she wrote, and the nearest thing she produced to an autobiography.
Did Georgia O’Keeffe write an autobiography?
Not as such. Her 1976 book Georgia O’Keeffe combines her paintings with her recollections of making them and of events in her life, and is often treated as her autobiography. Her letters, published after her death, fill in much of the rest.
Where can I read the letters between O’Keeffe and Stieglitz?
In My Faraway One (2011), edited by Sarah Greenough, which prints about 650 of the roughly 5,000 letters they exchanged, from 1915 to 1933. The correspondence was sealed at O’Keeffe’s request until 2006. A smaller selection appeared earlier in Georgia O’Keeffe: Art and Letters (1987).
What was the dispute over Georgia O’Keeffe’s estate?
Codicils she signed in the 1980s left most of her estate, valued at about 65 million dollars, to Juan Hamilton, who had worked for her as an assistant and companion since 1973. After her death in 1986 her family contested the will, and the case was settled out of court in July 1987.
What is the best biography of Georgia O’Keeffe?
Roxana Robinson’s Georgia O’Keeffe: A Life (1989) is the most complete single-volume life; Kirkus called it the most comprehensive to date. Laurie Lisle’s Portrait of an Artist (1980) was the first, and Hunter Drohojowska-Philp’s Full Bloom (2004) the most recent major one listed here.
Is Georgia O’Keeffe still alive?
No. She died on 6 March 1986 in Santa Fe, New Mexico, aged 98. The Georgia O’Keeffe Museum opened in Santa Fe in 1997.
When did Georgia O’Keeffe move to New Mexico?
She spent her first summer there in 1929 and returned almost every year. She bought a house in Abiquiú in 1945 and, three years after his death, moved to New Mexico for good in 1949.
Footnotes
- Georgia O’Keeffe — Wikipedia
- Georgia O’Keeffe: Finding Words — Georgia O’Keeffe Museum
- Portrait of an Artist review — The Christian Science Monitor, 1980
- Georgia O’Keeffe: A Life — Kirkus Reviews
- The Intimate Art: Georgia O’Keeffe’s Letters — Los Angeles Review of Books, 2011
- O’Keeffe and the pull of the Southwest — The Christian Science Monitor, 1987
Bibliography last verified 9 October 2026. Where sources give different first-publication years, this page uses the year in library catalogues or the publisher’s own record.
This list was not put together by a machine.
The notes are all mine,
and the books are all his.
Lisanne x
Written by Lisanne Swart, who has curated reading lists and author guides at lisanneswart.com since 2021.
See more on her personal bookshelf.
“The meaning of a word—to me—is not as exact as the meaning of a color.”
— Georgia O’Keeffe, Georgia O’Keeffe (1976)
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