Gertrude Stein

The friendship and correspondence of Gertrude Stein and Thornton Wilder encompassed the last twelve years of Stein's life and a period of major work by Wilder. A generation apart in age, the two writers met during Stein's acclaimed American lecture tour in 1934-35, during which they shared the experience of lecturing to audiences in the wake of great success. They quickly became mentor and pupil as well as friends, and Wilder eloquently passed on what Stein taught him through his introductions to her books. While Wilder supported Stein's efforts at publication, she held him to his vocation as a writer, urging him to ignore the distractions incurred by family and fortune. . The letters between Stein and Wilder contain ideas and plans about publications, attitudes toward fame and work, and thoughts about other artists and people near to them. They also refer to European-American cultural relations prior to and through World War II, show how Stein and Wilder responded to critical reception of their new work, and above all, examine how the two writers affected one another's progress. It is clear from the letters that without their friendship, Stein's Narration lectures would not have come about, The Geographical History and the novel Ida would have become different books, and Wilder's Our Town might not have become the play we know. The edition, fully annotated by Edward M. Burns and Ulla E. Dydo, includes a detailed chronology of Stein's lecture tour prepared by William Rice, staging histories of Our Town and The Skin of Our Teeth, and an account of Stein in World War II with new documentation.

Editor Renate Stendhal has selected 360 photographs (more than 100 of those seen here for the first time) of Gertrude Stein, her companion Alice B. Toklas, and the many familiar and famous faces who surrounded her.

Although Gertrude Stein, as much as James Joyce, is often considered the most famous and influential of modern experimental writers of prose and poetry, few realize the breadth and depth of her contribution to theater and opera, which hardly stops with the justly famous collaboration with Virgil Thomson, "Four Saints in Three Acts." She considered Operas and Plays to be her definitive statement, as of 1932, for the stage. Born in 1874 in Allegheny, Pennsylvania, raised in Oakland, California, she lived in France from 1903 till her death in 1946.

Written in 1932 at the house that Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas had rented in the Rhone Valley, Stanzas in Meditation is one of Stein's most abstract and complex works. It is almost as if Stanzas was conceived as a mirror opposite of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, penned in the same year. The latter, written in a more direct and normative language, brought Stein international acclaim and resulted in the attention she received from 1934 on, while the former remained unavailable until its publication, after her death, in 1956. To Stein readers and admirers, however, this is one of her most important works, a poetic achievement central to her canon. From John Ashbery's groundbreaking essay-review of Stanzas in 1957 to Richard Bridgman's 1970 publication, Gertrude Stein in Pieces, poets and critics have recognized the importance of this masterpiece.

Duplicate, see [OL5643332M]: /books/OL5643332M

Gertrude Stein was one of the most colourful personalities of the literary world during the inter-war years. This volume of her writings attempts to dispel some of the misunderstandings that surrounds her work, presenting many of her lectures for the first time.

Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons: Objects, Food, Rooms from 1914 is a poetic exploration of words - clustered, juxtaposed, redefined and played off one another - to subterfuge their common meanings, which Stein felt had become watered down, and to re-infuse them with expressive force.

"This is the first paperback edition of one of Stein's most revealing novels. Written in 1925-26 (but not published until 1958), it is Stein's midcareer assessment of herself, her writing, and her relationships, composed in the unique style for which she is celebrated. In place of a traditional narrative, Stein explores the nature of narrative, its possibilities, the various genres (historical novels, the novel of manners, adventure stories) available to the writer, the conventions of novel-writing, and the novelist's relation to her materials. In a sense, the novel is about "preparing a novel" (the subject of chap. 50), about everything that goes through a writer's head as she begins to write. Mixed in with her meditations on writing are daily events in her marriage to Alice B. Toklas, visits from friends - including such notable figures of the period as Josephine Baker, Virgil Thomson, Rene Crevel, and a number of expatriate American writers and artists - travels in and around France, memories of the past, inquiries into names and the nature of identity, and virtually anything else that occurs to her. As she writes at one point, "It can easily be remembered that a novel is everything," so everything of interest to Stein goes into her preparations for the novel that is A Novel of Thank You."--BOOK JACKET.