Books: Poet of The Desert

GEORGIA O'KEEFFE: A LIFE by Roxana Robinson

Harper & Row; 639 pages; $25

One of her earliest memories was of "the light -- light all around." Georgia O'Keeffe spent her life trying to recapture that elemental radiance on paper and canvas. The quest began obscurely on the loam of Sun Prairie, Wis., and ended famously in the desert of Abiquiu, N. Mex. O'Keeffe was the daughter of an Irish-American farmer and a Hungarian American of aristocratic descent. As art historian Roxana Robinson discloses in this romantic but insightful biography, both strains were apparent from the beginning. The child had six siblings,...