Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife

Summary

A Washington Post Top 10 Book of the Year
Fresh Air Top 10 Book of the Year

This critically acclaimed, “superb” (The Washington Post) biography of one of the most influential and mythologized literary figures of the 20th century examines both Gertrude Stein’s life and her partner’s emergence from the shadows after her death, in the decades-long fight to ensure her legacy.

Gertrude Stein’s salon at 27 rue de Fleurus in the 6th arrondissement of Paris is the stuff of literary legend. Many have tried to capture the spirit of the place that once entertained and fostered the likes of Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Pablo Picasso, but perhaps none as determinedly, and self-consciously, as Stein herself. In this “well researched, intriguing” (The Atlantic) biography of the trailblazing author, art collector, salonnière, and tastemaker, Francesca Wade rescues Stein from the tangle of contradictions that has characterized her legacy, presenting us with this towering literary figure, and her enigmatic partner, as we’ve never seen them before.

A genius to her admirers, a charlatan to her detractors, Gertrude Stein achieved international celebrity in 1933 with her bestselling memoir The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, written in the voice of her devoted partner—a triumph, which, ironically, only drew attention away from the avant-garde poetry she called her “real” writing. After Stein’s death in 1946, Alice B. Toklas made it her mission to shepherd all of Stein’s unpublished writing into print while negotiating her own fraught role in the complex mythology they had built together. Meanwhile, the biographers who flocked to Stein’s newly opened archive found a surprising trove of secrets that would change Stein’s image forever: a forgotten novel, a cache of love letters, and a series of notebooks that shed entirely new light on her early years in Paris.

Pushing beyond the conventions of literary biography, Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife “will forever be an essential tool for anyone studying or reading Gertrude Stein,” (The New York Review of Books) through its bold examination of the nature of legacy and memory itself, uncovering the origins of Stein’s radical style and revealing new depths to the storied relationship that made it possible. Captivating and brilliant, Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife is a groundbreaking examination of a true literary giant.