Today, modernist literary icon Gertrude Stein is famous for many reasons. The “autobiography” she wrote of her partner Alice B. Toklas: a gossipy, ironic tour of bohemian Paris, featuring memorable cameos by artist Henri Matisse, poet T.S. Eliot, Ernest Hemingway and others. Surviving Nazi-occupied France as a Jewish lesbian, somehow. And of course, her dazzling, disorienting and difficult body of work. Often in that order.
Francesca Wade’s ambitious new biography Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife charts how her subject sought and achieved lasting fame – but not exactly on her own terms.
“Work your ass off to change the language and don’t ever get famous,” experimental American poet Bernadette Mayer – who was influenced by Stein – told her students. Stein did, undeniably, challenge the way we think about language – as well as about meaning and literary form.
