ABSTRACT
Just as reviewers and columnists published frequent assessments of modern literature in newspapers and periodicals, attempting to classify and explain the value of the experimental writing that invaded the American literary landscape in the 1920s, critics also began to include discussions of Stein and other modernists in books with similar goals. Stein had been mentioned in several widely reviewed books of the mid-1920s, such as the 1925 memoirs by Sherwood Anderson and Alfred Kreymbourg, and Stuart P. Sherman’s collection of reviews, Points of View (1924). Including reviews of Stein in collections became more and more common; Edith Sitwell’s review of Stein had been reprinted in Poetry and Criticism, published by Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth press in 1925 and then released by Henry Holt in America in 1926, and Katherine Mansfield’s posthumous collection of reviews, Novels and Novelists (Knopf, 1930) also included a review of Stein that had initially appeared in England and thus became available to an American audience for the first time. These retrospective endorsements suggest that many writers and critics believed that Stein’s work was significant, influential, and had longevity. By 1930 any critic who wished to discuss trends in American literature or influential writers of the 1920s was compelled to explain, celebrate or dismiss the importance of Stein. Mainstream publishers regularly printed analyses of recent literature that included lengthy discussions of modernism, clearly with the expectation that readers did care about the pervasive debates in the media about the value of modernist work.
