Gertrude Stein Has Arrived

July 1, 2019

After years of toiling in obscurity as an American expat living in Paris with only a handful of influential devotees (such as Sherwood Anderson, Carl Van Vechten, and Ernest Hemingway), Gertrude Stein (1874-1946) vaulted to unexpected fame with the publication of her classic tell-all The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933). The book's widespread publicity encouraged Stein and her lifelong partner, Alice B. Toklas (1877-1967), to tour their native country, which Stein had not returned to since 1903. Morris (Fraud of the Century) painstakingly traces Toklas and Stein's steps across America in 1934 during the middle of the Great Depression; New York and Chicago are two cities the pair grow to love. Along the way, they meet and befriend a coterie of notable writers, including Thornton Wilder, Dashiel Hammett, and F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, and Stein is interviewed by young college newspaperman Walter Kronkite. Listing every stop during their tour can get monotonous. However, Morris succeeds in describing a time when an experimental writer could become a celebrity. VERDICT Accessible and engaging, this fresh look at Stein's life is especially recommended for those interested in modernist literature.--Brian Flota, James Madison Univ., Harrisonburg, VA

Copyright 2019 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

July 22, 2019
Literary biographer Morris (Ambrose Bierce) offers an entertaining and fast-paced chronicle of Gertrude Stein’s seven-month American tour in the fall and winter of 1934–1935. It served as a homecoming trip for the Pennsylvania-born, California-raised Stein, who had spent the previous three decades in Paris, there gaining her reputation as a fixture of literary modernism. However, she had only recently attained popular success, with the unexpected 1933 hit The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. Accompanied by the book’s putative author, her partner, Stein visited 37 cities, reacquainting herself with American life. Toklas and Stein were treated to T-bone steaks and green-apple pie in New York City, where everyone recognized Stein on the streets. In Chicago, Stein gave a lecture celebrating American literature’s fast pace and adventurous spirit. She also revisited her childhood home in Oakland, coining her famous adage, “There is no there there.” Drawing on contemporaneous newspaper stories and on firsthand accounts, Morris captures the excitement of the period when a cult avant-garde author found herself a national celebrity. He also conveys its transitory nature, noting that Stein’s follow-up, Everybody’s Autobiography, found little success, at a time when the prospect of war was increasingly on people’s minds. Morris’s lively account provides a window onto an enchanting chapter of modernist literary history.