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Summary
Summary
The friendship and correspondence of Gertrude Stein and Thornton Wilder encompassed the last 12 years of Stein's life and a period of major work by Wilder. A generation apart in age, the two writers met during Stein's American lecture tour in 1934-35, during which they shared the experience of lecturing to audiences in the wake of great success. They quickly became mentor and pupil as well as friends, and Wilder passed on what Stein taught him through his introduction to her books. While Wilder supported Stein's efforts at publication, she held him to his vocation as a writer, urging him to ignore the distractions incurred by family and fortune.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Lovers of modern American literature will be delighted to read this correspondence between the noted lesbian avant-gardist and the closeted homosexual playwright who wrote Our Town and the Skin of Our Teeth. Wilder wrote to Stein from 1934 to 1946 with some interruptions, usually in a blithe mood, addressing Stein and her lover, Alice Toklas, as "Dear Gertralicitude." Stein's letters are like all her prose, a combination of the cryptic and the colloquial, with expressions like "xcited" and "xhausted." The only flaw in this literary delight is in the editorial presentation, which is often too detailed and burdened with descriptions of interest only to textual scholars, while missing some perceptions that would be of broader interest. For example, Stein introduced Wilder to the gay pornographer and tattoo artist Samuel Steward, and the two got along so swimmingly that Wilder later destroyed all of Steward's letters to him: however, the present editors completely ignore the sexual subtext. Further, as ardent Stein-ites, they praise her at Wilder's expense, saying "to many, Wilder's stage cannot contain the great movements of Stein's ideas." There are some small problems like two letters in which Wilder says he's just read a book by the French philosopher Alain (Émile-Auguste Chartier), one dated October 30 by Wilder, and the other which the editors place in the following July: either Wilder spent ten months reading one book, or the dating is confused. This highly enjoyable material would have benefited from more careful and less pedantic presentation. (Jan.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
By giving both sides of an ongoing written conversation, this useful collection offers an unusual portrait of a long and important literary friendship. From Stein's thank-you note written in late 1934, the month after Stein and Wilder first met in Chicago, to Wilder's 1946 note of condolence to Alice Toklas following Stein's death, the letters record a warm friendship marked by a sharing of ideas, friends, and (perhaps not least significantly) a belief in Stein's genius. Wilder is the chattier of the two, whether reporting from Vienna that he has visited Freud, who informs him that the Earl of Oxford wrote Shakespeare's works, or from New York, noting that Mabel Luhan's effort to hold a weekly salon has failed. Wilder is forthright in discussing Stein's influence on his work, and in a 1937 letter says that the third act of Our Town ``is based on your ideas, as on great pillars.'' That Stein in turn appreciates Wilder's talent is apparent in her attempt to persuade him to collaborate on her novel Ida: ``a really truly novel is too much for me all alone we must do it together.'' Throughout, the letters are enhanced by thorough annotations that help make them accessible to a wide audience by supplying details on contemporary events and people, explaining allusions, offering speculations, and even editorializing when, the editors say, ``texts appear to ask for it.'' Likewise, the addition of useful supplementary appendices (on Stein's 193435 U.S. lecture tour; and on what occupied Wilder and Stein during WW II, when they exchanged few letters) help round out the scene surrounding the correspondence. Perhaps the most convincing marker of the success of this collection is that, in addition to conveying so much about these correspondents, it prompts one to regret anew the decline of letter writing. (illustrations, not seen)
Booklist Review
It's hard to imagine the literary letter collections of the future, what with e-mail and all, but back in the days of fountain pens and manual typewriters, writers wrote letters about writing, documenting the creative process and preserving their voice for all time. Literary letters are the primary texts of literary history and biography, and you can't find more electrifying examples than the correspondence between Ernest Hemingway and his unceasingly patient, supportive, and enthusiastic editor at Scribner's, the renowned Maxwell Perkins. Hemingway and Perkins began their felicitous partnership in 1926 with the tricky negotiations for The Sun Also Rises, discussions that established two key themes of their working relationship: money and language. As Hemingway pounds out novel after novel and story after story, he keeps Perkins apprised of his progress, expresses his uncompromising writing philosophy, boasts of his fishing and hunting prowess, and vents his ire at his critics and worry over his ever-shifting familial configurations. For his part, Perkins shepherds contracts for books, serializations, and movie rights, and offers praise and succor. The Hemingway-Perkins alliance is the stuff of legend; the friendship between Gertrude Stein and Thornton Wilder is a surprise. How did two such different writers, of different generations and with such radically opposed cultural backgrounds, become so close? As the editors succinctly explain, and the letters so eloquently prove, Wilder, 37 when he first met Stein in Chicago in 1934, was in dire need of a mentor, and Stein, sanguine at 60, was thrilled to find a new disciple, especially one as gifted and impressionable as Wilder. Bewildered by the fame that winning the Pulitzer for The Bridge of San Luis Rey brought, Wilder was torn between a stultifying sense of responsibility and a drive to create. Stein helped liberate him, and her influence is immediately apparent in his suddenly more exuberant letters. --Donna Seaman
Choice Review
Readers interested in Stein, Wilder, and the era of the 1930s will find these collected and well-annotated letters of much interest. Stein and Wilder met during Stein's American tour after the triumphant publication of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933), and the relationship flourished (along with the letters) until 1942. With Stein and Toklas in Germany, Wilder drifted away from the correspondence. These letters (and the almost as voluminous and useful annotations) span the years of Wilder's development as a writer and those of Stein's late work, which was more accessible than her best-known work. The reader can see Wilder working out problems in his own development; Stein for the most part wants only to know why he has not written. Thus, one learns more about the literary development of Wilder; but it is useful to see Stein's command of idiomatic English addressed to an admiring young writer, and readers can return to her early work with an enhanced insight. The introductory materials, extensive notes, and lengthy appendix materials on Stein's American tour make the collection valuable. Libraries that cater to graduate students and researchers interested in these two writers and the expatriate era and to readers (including ambitious undergraduates) of modernist American writers will find the book well worth having on their shelves. Q. Grigg Hamline University
Library Journal Review
When, in 1934, Thornton Wilder met expatriate and Lost Generation guru Gertrude Stein during her acclaimed tour of her native country, he found a soulmate and mentor whose thinking would, among other things, help shape Our Town. Annotated with exemplary care and detail, Wilder's lively, casually erudite letters and Stein's affectionate, plain, and simple messages from the rural French home front illuminate the last 12 years of her lifeand the busiest of his. Usually separated by the Atlantic and, in the early 1940s, by the German occupation of France, Stein served as a model of intellectual daring and artistic integrity for the conservative Wilder; while he served as intermediary between Stein and her American publishers. Features of this volume include a day-by-day chronology of Stein's American tour and the story of Wilder's complex relationship with Broadway producer Jed Harris. Highly recommended for any academic library with substantial holdings in modern American literature.Charles C. Nash, Cottey Coll., Nevada, Mo. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
