The Notebooks of Gertrude Stein

The Notebooks of Gertrude Stein for The Making of Americans 1903-1912 book is Professor Leon Katzs long anticipated full reconstruction editing annotation and decoding of Gertrude Steins Notebooks covering her early years in Paris and her creation of her great modernist masterpiece The Making of Americans.This book was born in Yale Universitys Beinecke Library in 1954 when Professor Katz found several boxes of Steins papers and began to put them in order soon realizing they contained not only the source material from Gertrudes own life that could for the first time make comprehensible the dense impenetrable prose of The Making of Americans but also could shed enormous light on her famous life in France her relationships with Picasso Matisse Hemingway and hundreds more. The Notebooks contains: Katzs transcriptions of Steins notebook entriesComments by Alice B. Toklas on the individual entries elicited by Katz over 5 months in 1954Further comments by Katz on the entries and on Toklas reactions.Katzs theory of Steins approach to the the novel.Over the years and decades the reputation of this book has grown enormous. Virgil Thomson after reading an earlier draft of this book said it is a new pinnacle high and possibly dangerous to inexpert negotiation like a partly exposed iceberg known as the Katz manuscript.Janet Malcolm wrote in The New Yorker in 2005: Although it has never come out as a printed book in the world of Stein criticism and scholarship it has become a kind of cult classic.Janet Malcolm also wrote that she and every Stein scholar she interviewed believe that The Making of Americans will only take its place among the monuments of literary modernism when the Leon Katz manuscript is published and Steins book can finally be understood decoded taught to students and appreciated by them.