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Gertrude Stein: Toklas Collection
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The Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas Collection is the physical property of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. Literary rights, including copyright, belong to the authors or their legal heirs and assigns. For further information, consult the appropriate curator.
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Modernist icon Gertrude Stein created some of the most innovative literary works of the last century, prefiguring the work of both Beckett and Ionesco. Perhaps best known for her memoir The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Stein's literary celebrity often eclipsed the genius of her actual writing. Rarely produced as a playwright, seldom read as an author -- despite her status as a literary giant -- Stein is a delight few audiences have had the chance to discover. She created landscapes of language that mirror the simplicity and joy of Matisse and the analytical bravura of Picasso. Director Frédérique Michel combines plays and prose fragments from Stein's oeuvre to showcase the author's sensuality, wit, playfulness and earthy sexuality in a work as original and daring as Stein herself.
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Gertrude Stein believed in her work, and so did Alice. Alice encouraged Gertrude to write her memoirs in a popular style so that they could cash in on Gertrude's talent. Finally, when she was almost 60, Gertrude did. Though titled The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, it's really a biography of Gertrude herself, written in the voice of Alice, by Gertrude, typed by Alice.
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Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein is edited, with an introduction and notes by Carl Van Vechten and with an essay on Gertrude Stein by F. W. Dupee. Vintage, 1990. Also The Library of America has announced a two-volume comprehensive collection of Stein's writing.
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In 1888, Amelia Stein (Gertrude's mother) died, and in 1891 Daniel Stein (Gertrude's father) died. Michael Stein (her eldest brother) took over the family business holdings, made wise business decisions and arranged the affairs of his siblings. Michael arranged for Gertrude, and her sister Bertha, to live with their mother's family in Baltimore after the deaths of their parents. (Mellow, 1974, pp. 25-28). It was in Baltimore that Gertrude met Claribel Cone and Etta Cone who held Saturday evening salons which Gertrude would later emulate in Paris, who shared an appreciation for art and conversation about it, and who modeled a domestic division of labor that Gertrude was later to replicate in her relationship with Alice B. Toklas.
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Stein's own innovative writing emphasizes the sounds and rhythms rather than the sense of words. By departing from conventional meaning, grammar, and syntax, she attempted to capture “moments of consciousness,†independent of time and memory. Her first published work was Three Lives (completed 1905, pub. 1909), short stories in which she explored the mental processes of three women, but her most characteristic and probably most difficult narrative is the lengthy, dark, dense, and repetitive The Making of Americans (completed 1911, pub. 1925). The famous Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933), a linear narrative written in relatively ordinary language, is the story of her own life presented as that of her companion. Stein's critical essays were published as Composition as Explanation (1926), How to Write (1931), Narration (1935), and Lectures in America (1935). Her many other works include the volume of poetry Tender Buttons (1914), a series of “cubist†verbal portraits; two librettos for the operas of Virgil Thomson, Four Saints in Three Acts (1934) and The Mother of Us All (1947); Wars I Have Seen (1945), some personal observations; and Brewsie and Willie (1946), about American soldiers in France.
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Toklas Collection