User:DeRossitt/Gertrude Stein (book by Michael Hoffman)

Gertrude Stein is a 1976 book by literary scholar Michael Hoffman. The book is part of the Twayne Authors Series.

Overview
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Reception
William Baker in The Antioch Review: [Hoffman] sees and illuminates the affinities between modernist painting and writing. He looks closely at an amazingly large selection of her works, treating "most of what is the largest corpus written by any major writer of our time." His thesis is that Gertrude Stein "is a major writer historically and intrinsically and that she has written some of the finest and most complex books of our time."

Perhaps the best book on Stein's works for the general reader. Excellent book, Mr. Hoffman.

A. T. K. Crozier in Journal of American Studies: Unfortunately, in his account of Gertrude Stein's writing after 1912, Mr. Hoffman finds it convenient to divide the remainder of her work into three generic types (" Operas and Plays," " Novels," and " Theories, Explanations, and Autobiography "—a chapter to each) and thus effectively quarantines his valuable comments on style and technique from any discussion of their implications, the promise of which is nowhere fulfilled in the curiously telescoped second half of the book.

There is a helpfully annotated " Selected Bibliography " in which Mr. Hoffman does not neglect to mention (albeit under an erroneous title) Laura Riding's essay in transition (No. 3, 1927)—still the best critical engagement with Gertrude Stein's work that we have.

David Stouck in Texas Studies in Literature and Language: Michael J. Hoffman, like Copeland, believes firmly that Stein is a genius, and in Gertrude Stein (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1976) he gives an intelligent account of her gradual abandonment of tra- ditional forms of narrative.