Gertrude Stein: The Language That Rises 1923-1934

This definitive book on Gertrude Stein provides the first extensive examination of notebooks, manuscripts and letters prepared over a period of twenty years. Gertrude Stein: The Language That Rises asks new questions and explores new ways of reading Stein, giving us a finely detailed, deeply felt understanding of the great modernist throughout one of her most productive periods.

From "An Elucidation" in 1923 to Lectures In America in 1934, Ulla E. Dydo examines the process of the making and remaking of Stein's texts as they move from notepad to notebook to manuscript, from an idea to the ultimate refinement of the author's intentions. Though not a biography, Dydo's book sets each text in the context of Stein's daily life and work, showing how her immediate world enters her writing, to be enlarged upon, deleted, transformed, or combined with other elements of reading or remembering. The result is an unprecedented view of the development of Stein's work, word-by-word, text-by-text, and over time.