Stein: Writings 1932-1946 - Hardcover

Stein, Gertrude

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1883011418 ISBN 13: 9781883011413

Publisher: Library of America, 1998

Synopsis

This Library of America volume, along with its companion, presents a full-scale gathering of the achievement of Gertrude Stein, the most radical innovator in twentieth-century literature. 

This second volume includes works written between 1932 and her death in 1946, years in which she gained a wider readership and made a triumphant return to the United States as a lecturer, but chose ultimately to remain in France during World War II. It opens with the poetic sequence Stanzas in Meditation (complete text published posthumously in 1946), perhaps Stein’s most austere and rigorous experiment in linguistic abstraction. In Lectures in America (1935) and The Geographical History of America (1936), she made the most of her newfound status as a public figure, exploring with brilliance and humor the philosophical implications of her writings, the difference between English and American literature, the importance of space in American culture, and much else. Picasso (1938) is a book-length study of the painter who was one of her closest associates, and whose work was a lifelong inspiration for her.

Stein’s playfulness is given full scope in the children’s book The World is Round (1939) and in Ida (1941), an enchanting exercise in pure verbal invention. The plays Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights (written 1938, published 1949) and The Mother of Us All (1947), inspired by the life of women’s rights activist Susan B. Anthony, give new twists to legendary and historical figures, while “Three Sisters Who Are Not Sisters” (1946) pays tribute to the melodramas that delighted Stein in her childhood. In her last major work, Brewsie and Willie (1946), a striking stylistic departure, she pays homage to the American soldiers she came to know after the liberation of France with a remarkable evocation of their speech and aspirations.

LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.

About this title

Review:

"It was all so nearly alike it must be different and it is different, it is natural that if everything is used and there is a continuous present and a beginning again and again if it is all so alike it must be simply different and everything simply difference was the natural way of creating it then." --Gertrude Stein on the subject of similarity and difference.

Gertrude Stein achieved fame for her (often) difficult, (frequently) inaccessible prose and her celebrated circle of friends--a group that included Hemingway, Picasso, Matisse, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. She became notorious for her long-time love affair with Alice B. Toklas and for the questions of possible collaboration that were raised in the wake of her surviving the German occupation of Paris during World War II. During the course of her lifetime and in the decades following her death in 1946, her reputation as an artist has been alternately dismissed and rehabilitated; now the Library of America has canonized her in two volumes. Volume I collects Stein's prose, poetry, lectures, and essays between the years 1903, when she moved to Paris, and 1932. This second volume of Gertrude Stein follows her literary career up until her death in 1946. From her libretto, Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights, to her meditation on the human condition, The Geographical History of America, Stein's brilliance in all its variety is readily available (if not always easily accessible) to her admirers.

About the Author:

Gertrude Stein was born in Allegheny, Pennsylvania, on February 3, 1874, to an affluent Jewish family, spent her early childhood in Vienna and Paris, and later grew up in Oakland, California. Her first important book was Three Lives (1909), then Tender Buttons (1914), followed by her magnum opus, The Making of Americans (1925), and the book which became a huge popular success, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933). Just before her death at the age of 72 on July 27, 1946, she asked Alice Toklas from her hospital bed, “What is the answer?” Getting no answer, she then asked, “In that case, what is the question?”

Catharine R. Stimpson and Harriet Chessman, volume editors, are Dean of the New York University School of Arts and Sciences and the author of Someone Not Really Her Mother, respectively.

About this edition

• Publisher: Library of America
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 1883011418
• ISBN 13: 9781883011413
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 844
• Editor: Stimpson Catharine R., Chessman Harriet