COMING SOON - Gertrude Stein Has Arrived: The Homecoming of a Literary Legend

My ninth book, Gertrude Stein Has Arrived: The Homecoming of a Literary Legend, will be released on September 10, 2019, by Johns Hopkins University Press. The book details the seven-month-long lecture tour of the United States that Gertrude Stein and her partner, Alice B. Toklas, undertook in the fall and winter of 1934, following the surprise success of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas a year earlier. It was the couple’s first visit to their homeland after three decades of living abroad, chiefly in Paris, where their apartment at 27 rue de Fleurus became a celebrated gathering place for artists and writers as towering and diverse as Pablo Picasso and Ernest Hemingway. On their tour, Gertrude and Alice crisscrossed the country, from New England to California, from Minnesota to Texas. They went everywhere and saw everyone, taking tea with First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt in the White House, attending a star-studded dinner party at Charlies Chaplin’s home in Beverly Hills, enjoying 50-yard-line seats at the Yale-Dartmouth football game in New Haven, riding along with homicide detectives in Chicago, meeting with the Raven Society in Edgar Allan Poe’s old room at the University of Virginia, and eating Oysters Rockefeller at Antoine’s restaurant in New Orleans. Everywhere they went, they were treated like everyone’s favorite maiden aunts—colorful, eccentric, and eminently quotable. The warm reception touched and surprised the couple, allowing them to rediscover their American roots. “I never knew it was so beautiful,” Gertrude said of their homeland. “I was like a bachelor who goes along fine for twenty-five years and then decides to get married. I am already homesick for America.”

Preorder the book today on Amazon or through Johns Hopkins University Press.