American writer Gertrude Stein (1874-1946) was a powerful literary force in the period around World War I. Although the ultimate value of her writing was a matter of debate, in its time it profoundly affected the work of a generation of American...

Just as the postimpressionists and cubists made us see paint and then made us see painting, Gertrude Stein made us see words and then made us see writing. Immensely various and wideranging, her work amounts to a systematic investigation of the formal...

Just as the postimpressionists and cubists made us see paint and then made us see painting, Gertrude Stein made us see words and then made us see writing. Immensely various and wide-ranging, her work amounts to a systematic investigation of the formal...

Amajor American writer associated with literary Modernism and Cubist painting, Stein is noted for her avant-garde approach to language and literature. Rejecting patriarchal literary traditions, Stein produced novels, plays, and poetry known for their...

Gertrude Stein (February 3, 1874 – July 27, 1946) was an American writer who spent most of her life in France, and who became a catalyst in the development of modern art and literature. Her life was marked by two primary relationships, the first...

A.A. Gill’s amusingly intemperate book on the English national character, The Angry Island: Hunting the English (S&S, $24), is a classic case of pot/kettle calumny. He thinks the “lumpen and louty, coarse, unsubtle, beady-eyed, beefy-bummed herd of England” is seething with repressed rage. Whether or...

Today's Highlight in History:On Oct. 28, 1886, the Statue of Liberty, a gift from the people of France, was dedicated in New York Harbor by President Cleveland.On this date:In 1636, the General Court of Massachusetts passed a legislative act establishing Harvard College.In 1776, the Battle...

You must be feeling pretty good about yourselves these days, ever since those Norwegian epidemiologists conferred the equivalent of intellectual primogeniture on all of you. And truth be told, we’d be feeling pretty good about ourselves too if the report had gone the other way...

Greater than the sum of its parts … Over the past several years, Janet Malcolm has published a series of essays in The New Yorker about Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, their life together in France, especially during World War II, their writings and...

In the following essay, Ruddick determines “Melanctha” to be Stein's conscious break with nineteenth-century literary standards.

In the following essay, Hilfer argues that “Melanctha” is a radical empiricist work in the vein of the philosophy of William James, in which “mood is a phenomenological reality.”

In the following essay, Neuman details the historical and literary circumstances surrounding the composition and staging of Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights.