ISBN 0 7206 1201 2
Literature
418pp
Paperback
£13.95
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Look At Me Now and Here I Am

The Selected Works of Gertrude Stein

‘One of the greatest writers of modern times’ - The Times

Gertrude Stein’s radical innovations and continual experiments with language were years ahead of her time. More than any other writer, Stein reflects the last century’s revolt from the fine arts.

Gertrude Stein was one of the most colourful personalities of the literary world during the inter-war years. This volume of her writings attempts to dispel some of the misunderstanding that surrounds her work, presenting many of her lectures for the first time.

Look at Me Now includes portraits of people (Matisse, Lipschitz, Picasso, Henry James and others), portraits of objects, her poetry, her novel Ida and her last work, Brewsie and Willie. Her lectures reveal a precise and original scheme behind her writing, drawing on concepts from William James’s theories of the aesthetic to Bergson’s notion of time. This accessible anthology presents the best of her startling achievements.

‘This excellent anthology allows us to approach her way of thought from several mutually complementary angles.’ - Times Educational Supplement

‘Well and thoughtfully designed . . . includes most of the major critical exposition and sufficient original work to give a sense that Stein, far from being merely the mama of Dada, was in fact the twentieth century heir of an in the best sense talkative tradition that reaches from the Elizabethan Robert Greene, through Defoe, to Trollope.’ - Robert Nye, The Times

‘A literary personality of unmistakable originality and distinction.’ - Edmund Wilson

‘Very clever and very witty in a funny way.’ - John Lehmann, Sunday Telegraph

GERTRUDE STEIN (1874–1946) was born in Pittsburgh of a prosperous German-Jewish family. She was educated in France and the USA, worked under the pioneering psychologist William James and later studied medicine. She moved to Paris in 1903 with her brother Leo; their household was joined by Alice B. Toklas in 1909. The Steins became important patrons of the arts, acquiring picues by the major French Impressionists as well as contemporary artists such as Picasso and Braque. Gertrude Stein also began to write: the novel QED was followed by other books including Three Lives and The Making of Americans.