Listen to Me

In 1933, Gertrude Stein published her groundbreaking memoir The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, which gained her instant celebrity. The following year she was invited to return to the United States for the first time since she left for France in 1903, to give a series of lectures on art and literature. Newly famous, Stein delivered her lectures, which double as a manifesto for her own, notoriously difficult work, to packed audiences at universities, galleries, members' clubs and public spaces up and down the country. The lectures are vital and provocative works which articulate the legendary writer's thoughts on the effect of modernism on literary form, the relationship between narrative and history, and between a writer, their work and its audience. In her trademark style she meditates on the creative possibilities of repetition, as well as her ambivalence toward her own literary fame and the destabilizing effect that notoriety had on her daily life. Listen to Me brings Stein's sparklingly witty, illuminating lectures together in one volume for the first time, selected and introduced by her acclaimed biographer, Francesca Wade.



Gertrude Stein (1874–1946) is one of the original American Modernists. Born in Pennsylvania, she lived most of her life in Paris with her partner, Alice B. Toklas. Formally groundbreaking works like Three Lives (1909), Tender Buttons (1914) and The Making of Americans (1925) established her reputation as an avant-garde stylist, and The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas made her an international celebrity. As an experimental writer she has been an inspiration to countless novelists and poets, from Ernest Hemingway and Edith Sitwell to Jack Kerouac and Robert Duncan.