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After the Second World War Gertrude Stein asked a friend's support in securing a visa for Richard Wright to visit Paris.

"I've got to help him, she said. You see, we are both members of a minority group."

The brief, little-noted friendship of Stein and Wright began in 1945 with a letter. Over the next fifteen months, the two kept up a lively correspondence which culminated in Wright's visit to Paris in May 1946 and ended with Stein's death a few months later.

Gertrude Stein and Richard Wright began their careers as marginals within marginalized groups, and their desire to live peacefully in unorthodox marriages led them away from America and into permanent exile in France. Still the obvious differences between them-in class, ethnic and racial origins, and in artistic expression-beg the question: What was there to talk about? This question opens a window onto each writer's meditations on the influence of racial, ethnic, national origins on the formation of identity in a modern and post-modern world.

The intuitive and intellectual affinities between Stein and Wright are illuminated in several works of non-fiction. Stein's Paris France and Wright's Pagan Spain are meditations on expatriation and creativity. Their so-called homecoming narratives-Stein's Everybody's Autobiography and Wright's Black Power --examine concepts of racial and national identity in a post-modernist world. Respectively in Lectures in America and White Man, Listen! Stein and Wright outline the ways in which the poetics and politics of modernism are inextricably bound.

At the close of the twentieth century the meditations of Stein and Wright on the protean quality of individual identity and its artistic, social, and political expression explore the most prescient and pressing issues of our time and beyond.

M. Lynn Weiss is an assistant professor of English and African-American literature at Washington University. ... Read more

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Frank Galati's dramatic adaptation of Gertrude Stein's texts begins with Stein at age 60 as she is lecturing at the University of Chicago in 1934.She starts to speak about her writing, specifically her use of repetition, and to connect this idea with her own life experiences.A young Gertrude then appears to guide the audience through her memories of her life as a student, falling in love with Alice B. Toklas, their time together in France and Alice's account of Stein's final day. These vignettes, each culminating in a song (music by Stephen Flaherty), adeptly encapsulate the joy and passion of Stein's life and work, and the depth and complexity of a lesbian romance.Galati sheds new light on Stein's views on language, communication, and ideas by emphasizing how her art evolved from her fascination with the repetition of human behavior-as Stein sings to the audience "Loving repeating is one way of being."
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Historical/Hysterical
Anyone interested in or familiar with the influx of American artists to France in the 1920 and 1930's will find these stories revealing and very entertaining.It was a fascinating period of cross cultural pollination, revealing personalities of expatriates Gertrude Stein and her lover and their talented friends.Rare and wonderful! ... Read more

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Dust jacket notes:"One of the strangest literary friendships was that between Sherwood Anderson and Gertrude Stein.The fact that these two dissimilar writers were close friends and that the friendship was somehow important to the course of American literary history is known, but no one has documented before its depth and importance.Whatever the basis of this friendship, it has become part of the folklore of American literary history that the relationship was indeed significant.Anderson always claimed that Gertrude Stein's writing influenced his own literary style.Miss Stein always claimed to have great affection and appreciation for Sherwood Anderson.Both authors claimed to have influenced the course of American writing - through their own publications and through having taught the basics of fiction to such younger writers as Ernest Hemingway.There are few enough facts available to document these claims of friendship and influence.After all, what sort of friendship could be expected between a sophisticated, highly educated esthete like Gertrude Stein and a comparatively uneducated, naive, midwestern ex-businessman like Sherwood Anderson?They had perhaps half a dozen meetings in the twenty years of their relationship, but from 1921 when they met in Paris until Anderson's death in 1941, each frequently expressed the deepest admiration and respect for the other's work.Together they have greatly influenced American literature and American literary history." ... Read more

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Letters and Essays That Form an Enjoyable Narrative
The letters and essays between these two influential writers form a narrative that reads almost like a novel. I found it helpful for working on my book Stein, Gender, Isolation, and Industrialism: New Readings of Winesburg, Ohio, but I also found it to be an entertaining document about friendship and the writing craft. ... Read more

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Making use of recent feminist critical theory, Doane considers Gertrude Stein's modernist preoccupation with narrative silence in her early novels. She demonstrates the effects of this preoccupation on Stein's literary development, from the conventionality of her first novel, Q.E.D., through Fernhurst and Three Lives, to the radical transgressions against narrative intelligibility in The Making Of Americans. Doane, contending that Stein's ultimate revolt against traditional modes of discourse is directly attributable to her position as a woman writer, effectively elaborates the possibilities of creating an alternative feminist discourse and explores the ways in which gender may contribute to meaning. ... Read more

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This book is a study of Gertrude Stein's diverse and idiosyncratic oeuvre, ranging from established works such as The Autobiography of Alice B. Tolkas to her lesser known pieces of theatre. Drawing upon feminist, psychoanalytic and performance theory, Nicola Shaughnessy re-evaluates Stein's prose, poetry and drama. ... Read more

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Gertrude Stein's works encompass a variety of genres. She explicitly called many of her works "plays," "operas," or "novels" intending her works to be read with certain generic expectations in mind, be it only to have them undermined. Although many writers depart from generic norms, Stein's generic transgressions are radical and are related to gender-specific traits of her writing. This work examines Stein's questions about gender hierarchies, classifications, and categories, and brings to light the direct relationship between gender and genre in her works. Gygax looks at a number of Stein's texts, including Ida A Novel, A Circular Play, Everybody's Autobiography, The Geographical History of America, and Blood on the Dining-Room Floor, which Stein called a "detective story." ... Read more