The Introduction discusses the “American Lawrence” in the contexts of transnationalism and the globalized New American Studies. This chapter argues that far from setting a narrow, national canon, as is often alleged, Lawrence’s essays on American literature, and his own American poetry and fiction, anticipate the recent “transnational turn” in American Studies. The Introduction goes on to offer an overview of Lawrence’s relationships with America and American literature, as a critic and as a professional writer. This chapter assesses the significance of Lawrence’s affiliations and affinities as a poet with the localized American aesthetic sponsored by Alfred Stieglitz, William Carlos Williams, and Mary Austin. The Introduction also provides an overview of the years Lawrence spent in New Mexico, between 1922 and 1925, and of his fraught yet productive association with the doyenne of New Mexico modernism, Mabel Dodge Luhan.