Gertrude Stein

Ulla E. Dydo is Professor Emerita at the City University of New York and is considered to be one of the world's foremost Stein scholars. She is also the editor of A Stein Reader (Northwestern, 1993) and the co-editor of The Letters of Gertrude Stein and Thornton Wilder (Yale University Press, 1996). She lives in New York City.William Rice (1931–2006) worked with Ulla Dydo on A Stein Reader and with Edward Burns and Ulla Dydo on various editions of Stein’s letters. A painter, he conducted extensive research on Picasso’s notebooks for Les Demoiselles d’Avignon.

“This book will . . . radically change the way we read Gertrude Stein. It is an extremely scrupulous and brilliantly documented inquiry into the question that has faced every reader of Stein: How does one word lead to the next? I don’t know of any other critical book quite like this one, and I think that it possibly sets a model for genuine literary biography.” ―Peter Quartermain, author of Disjunctive Poetics: From Gertrude Stein and Louis Zukofsky to Susan Howe"[Dydo’s] volume is something much more than just the most thorough reading Stein has ever had; it is a vision . . . of Stein herself. Dydo . . . has raised the bar for criticism and biography alike." ―Ron Silliman, Talisman“Perhaps the most comprehensive and surely the most interesting study of Stein’s compositional process yet attempted.”―Frances Richard, Brooklyn Rail