Gertrude Stein and the Making of an American Celebrity

Book excerpt: This book is a cultural history of Stein’s rise to fame and the function of literary celebrity in America from 1910 to 1935. By examining not the ways that Stein portrayed the popular in her work, but the ways the popular portrayed her, this study shows that there was an intimate relationship between literary modernism and mainstream culture and that modernist writers and texts were much more well-known than has been previously acknowledged. Specifically, Leick reveals through the case study of Stein that the relationship between mass culture and modernism in America was less antagonistic, more productive and integrated than previous studies have suggested.