La Tierra Natal

by Gertrude Stein

Gilbert A. Harrison, for many years editor in chief of the New Republic , was one of Stein's publishers. For this volume, he selected excerpts from her essays, novels, plays, poems, lectures, and interviews, to introduce readers to a little-known aspect of her work. The groundbreaking writer Gertrude Stein (1874-1946) was intensely American, though she lived most of her life in France. She returned only once to the United States, having left it at the age of twenty-nine, yet she never lost her plain American accent and manner nor her ardor for the United States. Stein approached her country with an appreciation akin to discovery. She wrote about it all―railroad stations, mailboxes, cities, farms, five-and-dime stores, drugstores, the food, the landscape, the speech, the ideas.

She wrote, too, about Americans she met in France, the writers and artists who flocked there in the twenties and early thirties, the doughboys of World War I, the GIs of World War II, and Americans she met when she came home briefly in 1934-35.

Paperback

First published October 1, 1985

About the author

Gertrude Stein was an American writer who spent most of her life in France, and who became a catalyst in the development of modern art and literature. Her life was marked by two primary relationships, the first with her brother Leo Stein, from 1874-1914, and the second with Alice B. Toklas, from 1907 until Stein's death in 1946. Stein shared her salon at 27 rue de Fleurus, Paris, first with Leo and then with Alice. Throughout her lifetime, Stein cultivated significant tertiary relationships with well-known members of the avant garde artistic and literary world of her time.

Reviews

[Heidi Bakk-Hansen]

This is a compilation of everything Stein wrote about America. I think I like the idea of Gertrude Stein more than I like Stein's writing itself. Mostly I find myself thinking that I would find her insufferable as a person. Oh well. The text itself, as a compilation, makes her writing even more disjointed than it is normally. The best thing about this book is that I lent it to a friend, and he wrote a poem and tucked it inside.

[Amy Day]

finished in '23

[Zoe Boxill]

Funky, commas, And. This made me realize who and what I am, as an American and as a butch and as an author.

[Vittorio]

See this link for an obtuse and wrongheaded attack on her work.



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