with the haunting name on the title-page, Geography and Plays, and with a jacket full of biography: Pennsylvania birth, early years in Vienna and Paris, Radcliffe, Johns Hopkins Medical School, return to Paris and art, friendship of Matisse and Picasso, publication of two famous books—The Portrait of Mabel Dodge and Tender Buttons—war work with a Ford car, a long silence, and now Geography and Plays. It was all real.
Better still, there is an introduction by Sherwood Anderson. It is exciting, just as that article in the New Republic was. One lingers over it in breathless expectation, and, after reading the book, one returns to it in brooding retrospect. Taken by itself, it makes very good and very absorbing sense. Some of the arresting sentences are these:
[Miss Stein is] a woman of striking vigor, a subtle and powerful mind, a discrimination in the arts such as I have found in no other American born man or woman, and a charmingly brilliant conversationalist.
Since Miss Stein's work was first brought to my attention I have been thinking of it as the most important pioneer work done in the field of letters in my time.
What I think is that these books of Gertrude Stein's do in a very real sense recreate life in words.
To these sentences should be added this shy little tribute from the wrapper:
Out of her early experiments has sprung all modern writing.
