User:DeRossitt/Gertrude Stein: A Biography of Her Work

Gertrude Stein: A Biography of Her Work is a 1951 book by literary scholar Donald Sutherland.

Overview
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Reception
Virgil Thompson in The New York Review of Books

Hugh Corbett in Books Abroad: Although this biography contains much of interest, it tends to be an irritating document. Sutherland has researched, analyzed, and presented with painstaking thoroughness, and has gone to enormous trouble to explain Gertrude Stein's idiosyncracies, unique style, highly individual pattern of thought, and the major principle underlying so much of her work, "the idea that present thinking is the final reality." However, the book has a flavor of conscious and purposeful erudition. The exegesis contains much special—perhaps too special—pleading so that explanations appear rather excuses and defenses. Greater detachment would have rendered the work more impressive. Instead, Sutherland appears like a disciple echoing his master's voice. One is left with the impression that the biographer has striven desperately hard and very cleverly to explain what is, to most readers, totally inexplicable.

Sonya Rudikoff in The Hudson Review: Mr. Sutherland's book is short but extremely comprehensive. In it Miss Stein's stylistic periods are examined with care, and the intentions of her work are discussed with reference to a wide range of literary examples. Mr. Sutherland is diligent in his use of various disciplines to illuminate the work. Repeatedly, he will introduce concepts from philosophy, painting, and music, to expand the intellectual background he evokes for Miss Stein, and to clarify her achievement. Mr. Sutherland writes from a thorough knowledge of Gertrude Stein's work, and he is as competent with her lesser known books as he is with popular ones. He is particularly suggestive in dealing with the absolute finality and immediacy that Miss Stein wanted to achieve. Throughout the book he devotes himself to her writing, but never uses his personal friendship to explain or justify it.

A. T. K. Crozier in Journal of American Studies: But the fashioning of crowns is no answer to the kinds of question which need to be asked about Stein's work, which indeed should be asked since we have had Richard Bridgman's analysis of the career (Gertrude Stein in Pieces, 1970) to provide the diachronic complement to Donald Sutherland's contentions on behalf of a synchronie and purely qualitative version of Steinian writing (Gertrude Stein, A Biography of Her Wor\