Gertrude Stein
Writings 1903–1932

Q.E.D. • Three Lives • Portraits and Other Short Works • The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas

"Few have left their mark on this century's literature as has Gertrude Stein. More than just influencing prose and poetry as one of our premier innovators of language, she is, you could say, one of the figures who invented 20th Century writing."—The Library Journal

"How pleased Gertrude Stein would have been to see so much of her work published in two volumes of the magisterial series devoted to the literature of our nation....
       ...All the famous portraits are here...the brief plays and scenarios, the apparently erotic poems ('Lifting Belly,' a tender salute to Toklas written between 1915 and 1917 and never published in Stein's lifetime) and of course 'Tender Buttons' (1914), perhaps the most exalted of all experimental texts....There are also many fictions from different decades, and certain theoretical texts of the widest possible application. So focused is the editors' scrutiny of the work, and yet so inclusive their range, that the figure of the creator appears with more distinct lineaments than in any other collection of Stein I know.
       ...Memoir, philosophical speculation, literary criticism and theory, all sorts of briefer forms that are hard to account for but easy to marvel at and even to delight in, pack these volumes and constitute, as the editors surely intended us to discover, the most consistently achieved representation of new ways of responding to life and new possibilities of getting experience into words that American literature has to show. How lucky we and Gertrude Stein are, now to have it so compactly to hand...."

"…Stein entered our language as the bard of a culture of confusion, the vastly imperturbable mother of an age that had given up on answers. Yet no one took more vivid pleasure in the questions than she did, or set them out in a more brilliant company, beginning with the famous salon where she gathered Picasso and Matisse and Braque… and Derain and Juan Gris and Apollinaire. Then, after the Great War, her rooms filled with charter members of the next cultural resurgence, and then the next, as there entered Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Cocteau, Bérard, Tchelitchev, Cecil Beaton, Thornton Wilder, Virgil Thompson, and Richard Wright. For decades, there seemed no end to her gifts of renewal. She was host, sponsor, critic, instigator, frequent foe, and sometimes friend again of some of the century's finest provocateurs, and it was often hard to tell whether her life was a party or a revolution. But her intent was serious ('desperately' serious, as Alice B. Toklas put it) and she knew all along that the stakes were as high as the opposition was strong. 'They needn't be so afraid of their damn culture she erupted early on and, for once, hung back in estimating her powers: 'It'd take more than a man like me to hurt it.'"

"Few have left their mark on this century's literature as has Gertrude Stein. More than just influencing prose and poetry as one of our premier innovators of language, she is, you could say, one of the figures who invented 20th Century writing."

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