Geography and Plays.
Stein, Gertrude. Geography and Plays. Boston: The Four Seasons Company, Publishers, (1922).
8vo.; front gutter browned; blue cloth, title label to spine; mottled light grey paper-covered boards, unprinted; pale blue printed dust-jacket; internal reinforcement and repair; spine browned; upper and lower panels darkened.
First edition, second state binding, of Stein’s assemblage of over fifty pieces; 2500 copies, the entire issue, which was printed in 1922 but bound up at intervals over the course of 18 years. Wilson A5b. With a four-page introduction by Sherwood Anderson, composed a year after their first meeting: in Paris, during the summer of 1921. Anderson, a fan of Stein’s work for some half dozen years when they met, calls Stein’s “the most important pioneer work done in the field of letters in my time,” and expresses a desire to help his fellow writers, “and particularly young writers,” understand her project. This project, as he sees it, is to “in a very real sense recreate life in words,” and to revitalize the English language. His final two paragraphs merit quoting in full:
There is a city of English and American words and it has been a neglected city. Strong broad shouldered words, that should be marching across open fields under the blue sky, are clerking in little dusty dry goods stores, young virgin words are being allowed to consort with whores, learned words have been put to the ditch digger’s trade. Only yesterday I saw a word that once called a whole nation to arms serving in the mean capacity of advertising laundry soap.
For me the work of Gertrude Stein consists in a rebuilding, an entire new recasting of life, in the city of words. Here is one artist who has been able to accept ridicule, who has even forgone the privilege of writing the great American novel, uplifting our English speaking stage, and wearing the bays of the great poets, to go live among the little housekeeping words, the swaggering bullying street-corner words, the honest working, money saving words, and all the other forgotten and neglected citizens of the sacred and half forgotten city.
Would it not be a lovely and charmingly ironic gesture of the gods if, in the end, the work of this artist were to prove the most lasting and important of all the word slingers of our generation! (pp. 7-8)
Praise which borders on hagiography seemed appropriate to Anderson who, in 1923 would count Stein—in print, in his autobiography—among the half-dozen greatest influences in his life. In her review of that volume, Stein named Anderson among the “four men in American letters who have essential intelligence.” (He was in good company, with James Fenimore Cooper, William Dean Howells, and Mark Twain. For more on their relationship, see the description of the copy of Lectures in America she inscribed to him in 1935.)
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