ABSTRACT
Nearly a century has gone by since Gertrude Stein began the extraordinary work of “taking apart language” in order to remake the world. Between 1903, when she began The Making of Americans, a heroic, intransigent, 1,000-page “history of everything that ever was or is or will be them, of everything that was or is or will be all of any one or all of them,” and her death in 1946, Stein produced a body of experimental writing that in pathos, scope, and splendor surpasses that of any other American writer of her generation. The monumentality of this literary achievement comes increasingly into focus as the sentimental cult of her personality begins to wane. Numerous memoirs and biographies over the years have borne witness to Stein's comical, beguiling, richly cultivated nature. “A rose is a rose is a rose” has found its way on to notepaper and embroidered knickknacks, and women's bookstores display rack upon rack of Stein postcards, calendars, and stuffed toys. But as the decades pass, and the golden, involving afternoons at the salon on the rue de Fleurus gradually recede into the distance, Stein's real accomplishment stands out: she “changed language and writing,” her latest editor, Ulla Dydo, observes, “for us all.”
