Gertrude Stein Has Arrived: The Homecoming of a Literary Legend

Literary biographer Morris (Ambrose Bierce) offers an entertaining and fast-paced chronicle of Gertrude Stein’s seven-month American tour in the fall and winter of 1934–1935. It served as a homecoming trip for the Pennsylvania-born, California-raised Stein, who had spent the previous three decades in Paris, there gaining her reputation as a fixture of literary modernism. However, she had only recently attained popular success, with the unexpected 1933 hit The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. Accompanied by the book’s putative author, her partner, Stein visited 37 cities, reacquainting herself with American life. Toklas and Stein were treated to T-bone steaks and green-apple pie in New York City, where everyone recognized Stein on the streets. In Chicago, Stein gave a lecture celebrating American literature’s fast pace and adventurous spirit. She also revisited her childhood home in Oakland, coining her famous adage, “There is no there there.” Drawing on contemporaneous newspaper stories and on firsthand accounts, Morris captures the excitement of the period when a cult avant-garde author found herself a national celebrity. He also conveys its transitory nature, noting that Stein’s follow-up, Everybody’s Autobiography, found little success, at a time when the prospect of war was increasingly on people’s minds. Morris’s lively account provides a window onto an enchanting chapter of modernist literary history. (Oct.)