Chapter 5 - Gertrude Stein
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
Summary
STEINIAN TOPOGRAPHIES: THE MAKING OF AMERICA
Suddenly you know that the geographical history of America has something to do with everything it may be like loving any man or woman or even a little or a big dog.
Gertrude Stein, The Geographical History of America, 84East and west.
George Washington is best.
No one need leave out north and south.
Gertrude Stein, “George Washington,” in Four in AmericaStein's pages have become like the United States viewed from an airplane.
William Carlos Williams, Imaginations, 350Gertrude Stein's enormous early novel The Making of Americans grew out of the restlessness of loneliness, indecision, and displacement. When she began it in 1903, she had recently left Baltimore, medical school, and her unhappy love affair with May Bookstaver and, after a period in London, was living in New York City. By that summer she had moved to her famous apartment at 27, rue de Fleurus, and was writing what she called her “American” novel in the atelier, after her brother Leo had gone to bed. The first four months of 1904 saw her back in New York where she wrote much of the early draft of the novel, which was not to be completed until 1908. By June she was back in Paris and would not return to the United States for close to thirty years.
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- Modernist Fiction, Cosmopolitanism and the Politics of Community , pp. 157 - 198Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2001