CFP for Edited Collection: Primary Stein (Abstracts by May 15, 2012)
The overwhelming success of Gertrude Stein's The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas finally confirmed Stein's celebrity status in the United States in 1933. Yet she lamented that she had become known less as an important author than as the host of a Parisian salon in which famous writers and European painters gathered amidst her collection of modern art. Her earlier, more challenging writing continued to go unnoticed and unpublished despite the wide public appeal of the autobiography and the success of Virgil Thomson's production of Stein's opera Four Saints in Three Acts in 1934.