Gertrude Stein’s America

This 1974 Liveright collection gathers Gertrude Stein's reflections on American identity, landscape, and consciousness. The title, drawn from Stein's characteristically repetitive yet revelatory prose style, announces her central concern: what it means to claim and be claimed by place.

Stein's experimental writing about America emerges from her unique position as an expatriate who spent most of her adult life in Paris yet remained profoundly engaged with American themes. Her essays and prose pieces explore American character, geography, and cultural distinctiveness with the same linguistic innovation she brought to fiction. The collection demonstrates how Stein's radical formal experiments served philosophical and cultural inquiry.

Published by Liveright, which had championed modernist writers since the 1920s, this paperback made Stein's cultural criticism accessible to new audiences during the 1970s revival of interest in her work. The volume complements her better-known fictional experiments, revealing the depth of her engagement with national identity and place.

Publishing Details: Liveright Publishing Corporation (imprint of W.W. Norton), New York, 1974. Trade paperback.