The Making of Americans, 1925

As a patron of the arts, Gertrude Stein used the Paris home she shared with partner Alice B. Toklas to foster the talents of avant-garde artists from Pablo Picasso to T.S. Eliot. In her own writing, Stein pushed against the Victorian literary boundaries of the preceding period, and in publishing The Making of Americans she solidified her legacy as an icon of modernism and the matriarch of the Lost Generation. “Her ambition [was] a literary plasticity divorced from narrative sequence and consequence and hence from literary meaning. She was trying to transform literature from a temporal into a purely spatial art, to use words for their own sake alone” (Schorer). By defying expectations surrounding narrative plot and character, The Making of Americans succeeds in this, and it has been praised as “resolutely American and indisputably original” (Grolier Club). This copy bears the penciled ownership inscription of William Troy, dated “N.H. 1926.” An academic and critic, Troy was teaching in New Hampshire following his graduation from Yale in 1925. He later married poet Léonie Adams, a fixture in Stein’s Paris salon. Troy notably defended Stein’s work against the sort of ridicule that her irregular prose tended to attract, writing of her later book The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas: “among books of literary reminiscences Miss Stein’s is one of the richest, wittiest, and most irreverent ever written.” It would appear, however, that he did not finish the present work, as the pages remain unopened after page 60.

Operas and Plays, 1932

“Where oh where is the man to publish me in series?” Gertrude Stein reportedly asked in 1916, after the release of her first book. Frustrated that her reputation as an art collector preceded her rank as an author, Stein founded Plain Edition in 1930 to reconfigure her role among the Modernists. “The Plain Edition Books were the first over which she could exercise significant control. Stein self-published by necessity, but gaining power over the physical production of her books had a significant by-product...as the publisher of the Plain Edition, Stein could make creative decisions about what her books would look like, how many copies to print, and where to distribute them” (Stone). Of the five books Plain Edition released, Operas and Plays was the penultimate; and it provided Stein a space to practice “a new dramaturgy, beginning with the pictorial conception of a play as a landscape...She made punctuation and typography part of her compositional style and chose words for their joyful impact as sound and wordplay” (Marranca). Such experimentation was only possible because Stein had the ability to check and revise her own work at Plain Edition, taking on the roles of author, editor, and publisher. An important literary and physical document of Modernism.