Reviews
... Morris succeeds in describing a time when an experimental writer could become a celebrity. Accessible and engaging, this fresh look at Stein's life is especially recommended for those interested in modernist literature.
An entertaining and fast-paced chronicle of Gertrude Stein's seven-month American tour in the fall and winter of 1934–1935... 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... Morris's lively account provides a window onto an enchanting chapter of modernist literary history.
[Morris'] writing is brisk and breezy... he magnifies and makes new.
In the annals of American celebrity, Gertrude Stein's barn-burning 1934–35 lecture tour, accompanied by her lifelong partner, Alice Toklas, may be in a class of its own. Indeed, it almost cries out for attention, as the literary biographer Roy Morris Jr. reveals in his brisk new book, Gertrude Stein Has Arrived.
While the story of becoming a literary celebrity at age sixty is familiar to anyone who knows the Stein saga, Morris has more to say about it than anyone before him.
In 1934, iconoclastic writer Gertrude Stein and her lifelong companion Alice Toklas arrived in America to promote Stein's witty, gossipy The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, a book that, to their surprise and delight, had become a huge success. Morris makes their nearly seven-month, cross-country journey central to his own witty, gossipy biography of the two eccentric ex-pats. Stein returned home to Paris in love with America; Morris's brisk, zesty tale shows us why.
In a remarkably concise and eloquent work, Roy Morris captures a vital cultural occasion when it seemed that all of America bounced to Gertrude Stein's beat. This fascinating story of Stein's barnstorming tour of the United States offers a lively and sympathetic exploration of art, literature, and celebrity at the moment when Modernism entered the mainstream.
Morris's remarkable, wonderfully written study observes Gertrude Stein engaging with all kinds of Americans on her Depression tour of the U.S.—from a future tattooist of the Hell's Angels to an eighteen-year-old interviewer named Walter Cronkite. This revelatory account is studded with pop cultural gems that appealed to Stein's restless temperament. Along the way, she visited a dance marathon at dawn; she delighted in a billboard exhorting, 'Buy your meat and wheat in Georgia'; she autographed a hazelnut for a young Scottie Fitzgerald. Roy Morris brings Stein's tour to vivid, incandescent life. Welcome back, Gertrude Stein!
A terrifically well-written and consistently engaging account of the lecture tour that Gertrude Stein undertook to promote her unlikely hit, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas.
Book Details
List of Illustrations
Author's Note
Introduction 3
1. A Bell within Me Rang
2. Many Saints Seen
3. You'd Better Come Over
4. Gertrude Stein Has Arrived
5. Yes Chicago Too
6. Naturally the Northern
List of Illustrations
Author's Note
Introduction 3
1. A Bell within Me Rang
2. Many Saints Seen
3. You'd Better Come Over
4. Gertrude Stein Has Arrived
5. Yes Chicago Too
6. Naturally the Northern Girls Came South
7. No There There
Epilogue. I Am Already Homesick for America
Notes
Bibliography
Index