Gertrude Stein | Books, Biography, eBooks, Audiobooks

Books by thisAuthor

(49)

Everybody's Autobiography
“Alice B. Toklas wrote hers and now everybody will write theirs.” In 1933 Gertrude Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas skyrocketed to the top of the bestseller lists, and the author found herself a celebrity. Everybody’s Autobiography is the very Steinian account of her soul-satisfying next five years in France, England, and America, where she made a triumphant tour of the country. Here are Stein’s devastating analyses of some of the major figures of the day whom she met—among them Dashiell Hammett, Charlie Chaplin, Pablo Picasso, Marianne Moore, Mrs. Roosevelt, and Sherwood Anderson—and also of her own life and work.
Visit Book Page
Three Lives
The first published work of fiction by legendary author and poet Gertrude Stein, Three Lives is a collection of two short stories and a novella focusing on the bleak existence that faced immigrant and minority women in turn-of-the-century America. Each impoverished woman must labor as a domestic worker to survive, and all three protagonists have their own tales of hardship. "The Good Anna" tells the story of a young German servant who must decide between loyalty to her employer and love. In "The Gentle Lena," another German servant girl marries the wrong man, and finds herself trapped as a wife and mother. And the introspective "Melanctha" examines the tragic life of a mulatto woman and those she loved. Pocket Books' Enriched Classics present the great works of world literature enriched for the contemporary reader. This edition of Three Lives has been prepared by Brenda Wineapple, professor of Modern Literary and Historical Studies at Union College. It includes her introduction, a selection of critical excerpts, and suggestions for further reading, as well as a unique visual essay of period illustrations and photographs.
Visit Book Page
Tender Buttons
Objects
First published in 1914, Gertrude Stein's revolutionary poetic work Tender Buttons is a must-read for every serious lover of literature. Delighting in the rhythm of words, its first section, "Objects," runs playful linguistic circles around teacups, ribbons, umbrellas, and other quotidian artifacts. Presented here in an exquisite small package, this new edition of "Objects" pairs Stein's avant-garde verse with colorful contemporary illustrations by indie art star Lisa Congdon, who illuminates and interrogates the classic Cubist text with visuals as capricious as Stein's own prose. A celebration of independent thinking old and new, this captivating marriage of image and text is a treasure of arts and letters.
Visit Book Page
Geography and Plays
Generous collection of works -- dating from 1910-1920 -- reveals Stein as a philosopher, poet, portraitist, dramatist and short story writer, as the investigator of the nature of language, and much more.
Visit Book Page
Three Lives
Gertrude Stein, as a college student at Radcliffe and a medical student at Johns Hopkins Medical School, was a privileged woman, but she was surrounded by women who were trapped by poverty, class, and race into lives that offered little choice. Her portraits of Anna and Lena are examples of realistic depictions of immigrant women who had no occupational choice but to become domestic workers. This collection of documents from the history of women's suffrage, medical history, modernist art, and literature enables readers to see how radical Stein's subject was.
Visit Book Page
Three Lives and Tender Buttons
Three Lives Three short stories comprise Gertrude Stein’s first significant work, each a psychological portrait of a different woman. “The Good Anna” is a kindly but domineering German servant. “The Gentle Lena” apathetically endures her miserable life until she dies in childbirth. “Melanctha” is a young Black woman learning about sexuality and love. Different as they may be, all three women are bound by poverty—and all three face the restrictions of class, race, and sex with resignation. Tender Buttons Stein spoke of maintaining a “continuous present,” comprised of “moments of consciousness,” independent of time and memory. Nowhere is this more clear than in her prose poems Tender Buttons. Their repetitive sentences, juxtaposition of sounds, and simple language connote this continuous presence. To live in this state is “to begin again and again,” to “use everything.” Each of the three sections, “Objects,” “Food,” and “Rooms,” employs both this repetition and disjointed words to build images. Prose poetry at its most abstract expression, Tender Buttons “is to writing…what cubism is to art.” (W.G. Rogers)
Visit Book Page
Paris, France
A witty, anecdotal account of Stein's lifelong love affair with France Gertrude Stein lived in Paris from 1903 with her brother Leo, acting as patron for a number of soon-to-be famous artists, most notably Pablo Picasso. Published in 1940, on the day that Paris fell to the Germans, this account blends Stein's childhood memories of Paris with trenchant observations about everything French. It is a witty fricassée of food and fashion, pets and painters, musicians, friends, and artists, served up with a healthy garnish of Steinien humor and self-indulgence. For readers who have previously considered Gertrude Stein to be a difficult or even unreadable author, Paris, France provides a delightful window on the personal and unique world of one of the 20th century's most celebrated modernists.
Visit Book Page
The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas
Stein's most famous work; one of the richest and most irreverent biographies ever written.
Visit Book Page
3 Lives
Consists of three character studies of women; "The Good Anna"--a kind but domineering German servingwoman; "Melanctha"--an uneducated but sensitive black girl; "The Gentle Lena"--a pathetically feebleminded young German maid.
Visit Book Page
Lucy Church, Amiably
Visit Book Page
Narration
Four Lectures
Newly famous in the wake of the publication of her groundbreakingAutobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Gertrude Stein delivered herNarrationlectures to packed audiences at the University of Chicago in 1935. Stein had not been back to her home country since departing for France in 1903, and her remarks reflect on the changes in American culture after thirty years abroad. In Stein’s trademark experimental prose,Narrationreveals the legendary writer’s thoughts about the energy and mobility of the American people, the effect of modernism on literary form, the nature of history and its recording, and the inventiveness of the English language—in particular, its American variant. Stein also discusses her ambivalence toward her own literary fame as well as the destabilizing effect that notoriety had on her daily life. Restored to print for a new generation of readers to discover, these vital lectures will delight students and scholars of modernism and twentieth-century literature. “Narrationis a treasure waiting to be rediscovered and to be pirated by jolly marauders of sparkling texts.”—Catharine Stimpson, NYU
Visit Book Page
How to Write
Not so much a "how-to" guide as an inspirational journey into the craft of writing by one of the 20th-century's most influential and unconventional literary figures. Also valuable as an entry into Stein's own writings. New preface and introduction by Patricia Meyerowitz.
Visit Book Page
Ida
A Novel
Gertrude Stein wantedIdato be known in two ways: as a novel about a woman in the age of celebrity culture and as a text with its own story to tell. With the publication of this workshop edition ofIda, we have the novel exactly as it was published in 1941, and we also have the full record of its creation. Logan Esdale offers informative critical commentary and judiciously selected archival materials to illuminate Stein’s experience of authorship from the novel’s beginning in early summer 1937, through the various drafts and negotiations with her publisher, to the reviews that greeted the book’s publication. Stein’s careful and systematic preservation of allIda-related materials for her archive at the Yale University Library was a conscious decision, and an invitation for us to study the complexity of her creative process.
Visit Book Page
Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein
"This collection, a retrospective exhibit of the work of a woman who created a unique place for herself in the world of letters, contains a sample of practically every period and every manner in Gertrude Stein's career. It includes The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas in its entirety; selected passages from The Making of Americans; "Melanctha"from Three Lives; portraits of the painters Cezanne, Matisse, and Picasso; Tender Buttons; the opera Four Saints in Three Acts; and poem, plays, lectures, articles, sketches, and a generous portion of her famous book on the Occupation of France, Wars I Have Seen.
Visit Book Page
A Stein Reader
Visit Book Page
Stanzas in Meditation
The Corrected Edition
In the 1950s, Yale University Press published a number of Gertrude Stein's posthumous works, among them her incomparableStanzas in Meditation. Since that time, scholars have discovered that Stein's poem exists in several versions: a manuscript that Stein wrote and two typescripts that her partner Alice B. Toklas prepared. Toklas’s work on the second typescript changed the poem when, enraged upon detecting in it references to a former lover, she not only adjusted the typescript but insisted that Stein make revisions in the original manuscript. This edition ofStanzas in Meditationis the first to confront the complicated story of its composition and revision. Through meticulous archival work, the editors present a reliable reading text of Stein's original manuscript, as well as an appendix with the textual variants among the poem's several versions. This record of Stein's multi-layered revisions enables readers to engage more fully with the author's radically experimental poem and also to detect the literary impact of Stein's relationship with Toklas. The editors’ preface and poet Joan Retallack’s introduction offer insight into the complexities of reading Stein's poetry and the innovative modes of reading that her works require and generate. Students and admirers of Stein will welcome this illuminating new contribution to Stein’s oeuvre.
Visit Book Page
To Do
A Book of Alphabets and Birthdays
The first paperback edition of the great children/adult novel by Gertrude Stein.
Visit Book Page
Useful Knowledge
Useful Knowledge is pleasant and therefore it is very much to be enjoyed," writes Gertrude Stein in her "Advertisement for this Book"-an apt characterization of the experience of reading it sixty years after its disappearance from print. Despite her long expatriation, she "always remained" in her words, "firmly born in Allegheny Pennsylvania." Indeed- physical detachment from her homeland seems only to have deepened her love for the country, a passion very nearly erotic, that blossomed in this private remembrance that is both tender and humorous. War, Woodrow Wilson, Chicago, Sherwood Anderson-such is the range of her intimate concerns. As for the significant questions to which her writings respond: "Wherein Iowa differs from Kansas and Indiana" and "Wherein the South differs from the North," useful knowledge indeed, when the thought is opened along with the word in these extraordinary prose inventions. Keith Waldrop's introduction furnishes new insight into the process and development of Stein's infamous style as always more intricately evolving than is recognized. And Edward Burns provides "useful knowledge about Useful Knowledge," the kind of information about Stein's text that we rarely find when we most want it
Visit Book Page
A Novel of Thank You
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.
Visit Book Page
Gertrude Stein's America
The groundbreaking writer Gertrude Stein (1874-1946) was intensely American, though she lived most of her life in France. She returned only once to the United States, having left it at the age of twenty-nine, yet she never lost her plain American accent and manner nor her ardor for the United States. Stein approached her country with an appreciation akin to discovery. She wrote about it allârailroad stations, mailboxes, cities, farms, five-and-dime stores, drugstores, the food, the landscape, the speech, the ideas. She wrote, too, about Americans she met in France, the writers and artists who flocked there in the twenties and early thirties, the doughboys of World War I, the GIs of World War II, and Americans she met when she came home briefly in 1934-35.
Visit Book Page

SHOW ALL BOOKS