ENGL2035:
Modernism

Handbook entry 

Gertrude Stein

For general reference, there's Ray Lewis White's Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas: A Reference Guide (Z8838.9.W48 1984). Robert Bartlett Haas's A Primer for the Gradual Understanding of Gertrude Stein (PS3537.T323A6 1971) can be useful too.

Janet Hobhouse's Everybody Who Was Anybody (PS3537.T323 Z647 1975) is a brief biography. James R. Mellow's Charmed Circle: Gertrude Stein and Company (PS3537.T323 Z72 1974) is about Stein's literary circle in Paris, a sort of collective biography. For an illustrated biography, see W. G. Rogers, Gertrude Stein is Gertrude Stein is Gertrude Stein: Her Life and Work (PS3537.T323 Z795 1973).

Stein's own autobiographies are The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (PS3537.T323 Z5 1933), Everybody's Autobiography (PS3537.T323 Z53 1937) and Wars I have Seen (PS3537.T323 W3 1945A). A good selection of her writing can be found in Look at Me Now and Here I Am: Writings and Lectures, 1909-45, edited by Patricia Mayerowitz (PS3537.T323A6 1971A). Despite the odd difference in dates in the titles, Writings and Lectures 1911-1945 (PS3537.T323A6 1967) is exactly the same selection, down to the page numbers. How Writing is Written, edited by Robert Bartlett Haas (PS3537.T323 A6V.2), is a collection of previously unpublished writings, some of which are on writing.

Richard Bridgman's Gertrude Stein in Pieces (PS3537.T323Z56 1971) is a key text in Stein criticism, opening up the ways into many of the more opaque texts.

Wendy Steiner's Exact Resemblance to Exact Resemblance (PS3537.T323Z8267 1978) is a study of that Steinian genre, the portrait. Ever wondered what a play by Stein would be like? The video Three Plays of Gertrude Stein (PS3537.T323A6 1989) has three short plays on it: In a Garden, which is (and I'm quoting the summary in the catalogue here) a tragedy in one act, about two kings who fight over a queen; Three Sisters Who Are Not Sisters, a melodrama which is the story of three female orphans and two brothers who enact the murdering of one another; and Look and Long, the story of a man, a woman, and two children who are visited by a strange spider creature who changes their physical forms.

The World of Gertrude Stein has biographical information, pictures and links. The American Memory site has a number of photographs of Stein by her friend Carl van Vechten. Michael Powers's Gertrude Stein Resources is a good collection of links. And though Tenderbuttons: Gertrude Stein Online doesn't seem to have been updated since about 1998, what's there is still very useful and well worth a visit: Time-sense, an electronic quarterly which unfortunately didn't get beyond a second issue, a subsite on Stein's writings for the theatre, and a critical bibliography.

If you want to see the art collection Stein and her brother put together in Paris, check out the N. Y. Museum of Modern Art's catalogue from its 1970 exhibition, Four Americans in Paris: The Collections of Gertrude Stein and Her Family (N5220.S785 N4 1970)

Project Bartleby has etexts of Tender Buttons and Three Lives.

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