Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife

Description: A Washington Post Top 10 Book of the Year
Fresh Air Top 10 Book of the Year

This critically acclaimed, "superb" (The Washington Post) biography of one of the most influential and mythologized literary figures of the 20th century examines both Gertrude Stein's life and her partner's emergence from the shadows after her death, in the decades-long fight to ensure her legacy.

Gertrude Stein's salon at 27 rue de Fleurus in the 6th arrondissement of Paris is the stuff of literary legend. Many have tried to capture the spirit of the place that once entertained and fostered the likes of Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Pablo Picasso, but perhaps none as determinedly, and self-consciously, as Stein herself. In this "well researched, intriguing" (The Atlantic) biography of the trailblazing author, art collector, salonnière, and tastemaker, Francesca Wade rescues Stein from the tangle of contradictions that has characterized her legacy, presenting us with this towering literary figure, and her enigmatic partner, as we've never seen them before.

A genius to her admirers, a charlatan to her detractors, Gertrude Stein achieved international celebrity in 1933 with her bestselling memoir The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, written in the voice of her devoted partner--a triumph, which, ironically, only drew attention away from the avant-garde poetry she called her "real" writing. After Stein's death in 1946, Alice B. Toklas made it her mission to shepherd all of Stein's unpublished writing into print while negotiating her own fraught role in the complex mythology they had built together. Meanwhile, the biographers who flocked to Stein's newly opened archive found a surprising trove of secrets that would change Stein's image forever: a forgotten novel, a cache of love letters, and a series of notebooks that shed entirely new light on her early years in Paris.

Pushing beyond the conventions of literary biography, Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife "will forever be an essential tool for anyone studying or reading Gertrude Stein," (The New York Review of Books) through its bold examination of the nature of legacy and memory itself, uncovering the origins of Stein's radical style and revealing new depths to the storied relationship that made it possible. Captivating and brilliant, Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife is a groundbreaking examination of a true literary giant.

Brief description: Francesca Wade is the author of Square Haunting: Five Writers in London Between the Wars. She has received fellowships from the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center, the Leon Levy Center for Biography, and the Harvard Radcliffe Institute, and her writing has appeared in The New York Review of Books, London Review of Books, The Paris Review, Granta, and other places.

Review Quotes: "[A] masterpiece of biography...Wade shows a great sensitivity to the morality of biography writing...She's an exceptional writer, able to draw out the legend, the contradictions and the reality in a fully coherent, dizzyingly comprehensive triptych... She cares as much about the work as she does the complex, brilliant and contradictory person who created it. Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife, exhaustively researched and beautifully written, will become the definitive biography."
--The Telegraph

"'Impressive... As an experiment in biography, [Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife] is strikingly accomplished; as a tale of literary intrigue, it is utterly compelling...For one so invested in her afterlife, [Stein] would have been pleased with such fruits, one imagines, although with none more perhaps than this rich and moving biography of her life and work, placing Toklas at its centre. Vindication at last."
--The Sunday Times

"Graceful, exacting...Gertrude Stein: An Aterlife does something larger regarding Stein, and biography, as if the question of how useful biography may be for thinking about Stein could become an allegory or test case of biography in general...Wade's book is excitingly different, because it is written not from a position of judgment but from a kind of accurate friendliness."
--London Review of Books

"Beguiling...Invigorating...The full story of their love affair can only now be told, uncensored, in an afterlife that Wade captures so vividly here."
--The Financial Times

"Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife captures another iron-willed modern at her Bernhardt best....Toklas long hoped some talented scholar would confirm Stein as a founding modernist...in our time, the scrupulous, perceptive Wade comes closest, especially in her skilled readings of intricate palimpsest texts like The Making of Americans. And though split-screen treatments pervade cultural history...here the before-and-after structure wonderfully clarifies a writer whose significance blossomed in death....Wade makes the archival grind feel fresh and glamorous....and Toklas bursts to the foreground as never before..."
--American Scholar

"...not only a fresh look at the quintessential American in Paris but also an investigation into what it takes to build a literary legacy."
--Town and Country

"When I had finished reading this tremendous biography, I was so exhilarated and intrigued that I started to look for archive footage of Gertrude Stein... Wade's book is especially impressive [because of] the structure, which had a salient link to Stein's most famous work...This is not dry academia, but an insightful examination of how lives are protected, memorialised and canonised...Wade also engages, critically, creatively and respectfully with Stein's work."
--The Scotsman

"A sensitive, compelling study...Wade shows that even the most abstract art is bound up with life...[Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife] reveal[s] something unlikely and essential about Stein: she wrote to connect with others."
--Literary Review

"Thoughtful and deeply researched."
--The Guardian