("It was all so nearly alike it must be different and it is different, it is natural that if everything is used and there is a continuous present and a beginning again and again if it is all so alike it must be simply different and everything simply difference was the natural way of creating it then." --Gertrude Stein on the subject of similarity and difference.

Gertrude Stein achieved fame for her (often) difficult, (frequently) inaccessible prose and her celebrated circle of friends--a group that included Hemingway, Picasso, Matisse, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. She became notorious for her long-time love affair with Alice B. Toklas and for the questions of possible collaboration that were raised in the wake of her surviving the German occupation of Paris during World War II. During the course of her lifetime and in the decades following her death in 1946, her reputation as an artist has been alternately dismissed and rehabilitated; now the Library of America has canonized her in two volumes. Volume I collects Stein's prose, poetry, lectures, and essays between the years 1903, when she moved to Paris, and 1932. This second volume of Gertrude Stein follows her literary career up until her death in 1946. From her libretto, Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights, to her meditation on the human condition, The Geographical History of America, Stein's brilliance in all its variety is readily available (if not always easily accessible) to her admirers.

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