From the Walt Whitman Collection

***

From the Alfred Stieglitz / Georgia O’Keeffe Archive (from Lenore Tawney)

***

From the Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas Papers (from Picasso)

***

From the Katherine S. Dreier Papers / Societe Anonyme Papers (from Kurt Schwitters)

***

From the Ezra Pound Papers (from T.S. Eliot)

In the 1950s, Yale University Press published a number of Gertrude Stein’s posthumous works, among them her incomparable Stanzas in Meditation. Since that time, scholars have discovered that Stein’s poem exists in several versions: a manuscript that Stein wrote and two typescripts that her partner Alice B. Toklas prepared. Toklas’ work on the second typescript changed the poem when, enraged upon detecting in it references to a former lover, she not only adjusted the typescript but insisted that Stein make revisions in the original manuscript.

This edition of Stanzas in Meditation is the first to confront the complicated story of its composition and revision. Through meticulous archival work, the editors present a reliable reading text of Stein’s original manuscript, as well as an appendix with the textual variants among the poem’s several versions. This record of Stein’s multi-layered revisions enables readers to engage more fully with the author’s radically experimental poem and also to detect the literary impact of Stein’s relationship with Toklas. The editors’ preface and poet Joan Retallack’s introduction offer insight into the complexities of reading Stein’s poetry and the innovative modes of reading that her works require and generate.

Students and admirers of Stein will welcome this illuminating new contribution to Stein’s oeuvre.

Order from Yale UP: Stanzas in Meditation

Miguel Covarrubias, Hand painted New Year’s card sent to Carl Van Vechten (Portrait of Rose and Miguel Covarrubias), 1946. From the Carl Van Vechten Papers.

Ida: A Novel
a new edition, edited by Logan Esdale; published by Yale University Press

Gertrude Stein wanted Ida to be known in two ways: as a novel about a woman in the age of celebrity culture and as a text with its own story to tell. With the publication of this workshop edition of Ida, we have the novel exactly as it was published in 1941, and we also have the full record of its creation. Logan Esdale offers informative critical commentary and judiciously selected archival materials to illuminate Stein’s experience of authorship from the novel’s beginning in early summer 1937, through the various drafts and negotiations with her publisher, to the reviews that greeted the book’s publication. Stein’s careful and systematic preservation of all Ida-related materials for her archive at the Yale University Library was a conscious decision, and an invitation for us to study the complexity of her creative process.

Gertrude Stein (1874–1946) was born in Allegheny, PA, of German-Jewish immigrants. She moved to Paris in 1903 and lived in France for the rest of her life. She published Ida: A Novel in 1941, eight years after she became famous for her best-selling Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. Logan Esdale teaches at California State University, Long Beach.

Beinecke Collections: Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas Papers Finding Aid (YCAL MSS 76); Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas Papers Image Guide