Born November 15, 1887, Georgia O’Keeffe lived 98 years to become one of the most well known and celebrated American artists of the twentieth century. But to her husband Alfred Stieglitz, the man who had first brought her work to New York, she was “Sweetestheart”, and he was “Dearest Duck.”

In honor of her birthday, we’d like to offer a free excerpt from their first volume of correspondence, My Faraway One, published earlier this year and edited by renowned photography scholar Sarah Greenough, whom O’Keeffe personally chose to edit the letters, on the condition they remain sealed twenty-five years after her death in 1986. Covering the years 1915 – 1933, from O’Keeffe’s first letter to Stieglitz in 1915 through their marriage in 1924 to the near demise of their relationship in 1933, Greenough’s carefully selected and annotated letters vividly recreate the couple’s art and ideas, friendships with the most influential of American and European Modernists, opening a window into the cultural impacts of the World Wars and the Depression on creative society.

This selection of correspondence, set between July 6 – 11, 1929, with O’Keeffe at Taos and Stieglitz at Lake George, includes one of Greenough’s favorites of O’Keeffe to Stieglitz. They write passionately about their relationship as lovers and artists, each in distinct voice, and their reflections on love and success remind us why these two were so influential in their time together, and long after.