SOURCE: Neuman, Shirley. “‘Would a viper have stung her if she had only had one name?’: Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights.” In Gertrude Stein and the Making of Literature, edited by Shirley Neuman and Ira B. Nadel, pp. 168-93. Boston: Northeastern University Presses, 1988.

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

Ida a Novel Becomes an Opera

‘[I]n a kind of a way novels are still a puzzle to me',¹ Gertrude Stein explained as she began Ida a Novel. The puzzle proved difficult. Between mid-May and December 1937 she wrote at least three brief and unsatisfactory drafts of an opening for Ida.² By early December she thought that a conversation with Thornton Wilder had given her ‘a scheme for Ida which [would] pull it together’.³ But when, after Christmas festivities and a move to...