Lectures in America.
Inscribed to Sherwood Anderson
Stein, Gertrude. Lectures in America. New York: Random House, (1935).
8vo.; top edge stained black; beige cloth stamped in black and red; spine browned; lightly used. In a specially made cloth slipcase.
First edition; 3400 copies, 1070 of which were done up in a remainder binding. Prints six lectures: “What Is English Literature”; “Pictures”; “Plays”; “The Gradual Making of the Making of Americans”; “Portraits and Repetition”; and “Poetry and Grammar.” Wilson A24. A presentation copy, inscribed on the front endpaper to Sherwood Anderson: To Sherwood with all my love Gertrude.
Sherwood Anderson was a close friend, apt pupil, and shared, for a time, the role of mentor to Hemingway (they had a severe falling out with the publication of Hemingway’s The Torrents of Spring, his 1926 parody of Anderson’s Dark Laughter. Anderson had been a fan of Stein ever since reading Tender Buttons in 1914, and later recalled:
It exciting me as one might grow excited in going into a new and wonderful country where everything is strange—a sort of Lewis and Clark expedition for me…The result was I thought a new familiarity with the words of my own vocabulary. I became a little conscious where before I had been unconscious. Perhaps it was then I really fell in love with words, wanted to give each word I used every change to show itself at its best. (Quoted in Mellow, p. 258)
He finally met her in the summer of 1921 on a trip to Paris. His conversation there, the article he wrote of the encounter (“Four American Impressions,” The New Republic, October 11, 1922), and his subsequent correspondence to her, was nothing but complimentary. If she was not as effusive in return, she did ask him to write an introduction to Geography and Plays (December 1922), a task he welcomed enthusiastically though later he would qualify his appreciation of Stein as having done something important “for the artists who happens to work with words as his material,” though not “for the public” (quoted, p. 260). In 1923 he counted her among the half-dozen greatest influences in his life, to be included as such in his autobiography A Story Teller’s Story; in 1925 she reviewed it, counting him among the “four men in American letters who have essential intelligence” (the others were Fenimore Cooper, William Dean Howells, and Mark Twain).
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