No no no, nonsense, never: Hidden notebooks reveal the tense relationships behind Gertrude Stein’s genius

 
Illustration by Maira Kalman; from The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas Illustrated by Gertrude Stein

“In Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice (2007), Janet Malcolm turned to the murky world of Gertrude Stein scholarship. ... In 1948, two years after Stein’s death, while working in the Yale University Library as a doctoral student exploring her early writings, Katz had come across a brown paper packet containing a tranche of grey-covered notebooks. As he leafed through their pages, Katz became gripped. He realized that these were the notes from which Stein had worked during the years 1902 to 1911, while drafting The Making of Americans, a sprawling 1,000-page epic eventually published in 1925, which broke away from previous forms of narrative writing and sought to tell a complete ‘history of everyone who ever was or is or will be living’. ...”

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