ABSTRACT
Three Lives is indubitably a masterwork of style, one of those exemplary works with which there is initiated the creative life of a person who will make of expression the perpetual question and sometimes the monomania of all existence. The book was born among unusual circumstances of ambience which are recalled for us in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, which is the autobiography of Gertrude Stein herself. Composed during a period of realistic and sentimental stagnation in American fiction. These Three Lives are preeminently the discovery of a language, of an imaginative rhythm which tends to become itself the argument of the tale, the spiritual boundary of a magic and motionless daily reality. This world, variously figured in the three tales according to the temperaments of the women who give them their titles, has its recurrent theme, almost a rhythm, in the calm and natural deaths of the protagonists.
