Gertrude Stein

Everybody's Autobiography Gertrude Stein

Everybody's Autobiography is among the very best of Gertrude's writing--[it] speaks with the true and original voice of Gertrude Stein, without apparent art or bravado.--Janet HobhouseIn 1937, Gertrude Stein wrote a sequel to The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, but this darker and more complex work was long misunderstood and neglected. An account of her experiences in the wake of having authored a bestseller, Everybody's Autobiography is as funny and engaging as The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, but it is also a searing meditation on the meaning of success and identity in America. Posing as the representative American, Stein transforms her story into history--responding to the tradition of Thoreau and Henry Adams, she writes: "I used to be fond of saying that America, which was supposed to be a land of success, was a land of failure. Most of the great men in America had a long life of early failure and a long life of later failure." Everybody's Autobiography is Stein at her most accessible and her most serious, and may yet prove to be among her most popular books.