GERTRUDE STEIN Ultimate Collection: Novels, Short Stories, Poetry, Plays, Memoirs & Essays E-Book
Gertrude Stein
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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
- Sprache: Englisch
Gertrude Stein's "GERTRUDE STEIN Ultimate Collection: Novels, Short Stories, Poetry, Plays, Memoirs & Essays" is a monumental anthology that encapsulates her innovative literary genius. This collection showcases her distinctive styles, characterized by experimental and repetitive language, which challenges the conventions of narrative and poetic forms. Stein's work reflects the avant-garde movements of the early 20th century, melding modernism with an exploration of identity and the intricacies of perception. This comprehensive edition presents an array of her most significant contributions, from the groundbreaking "Three Lives" to the evocative prose poetry of "Tender Buttons," offering readers insights into her artistic development and thematic concerns. Gertrude Stein (1874-1946) was not only a seminal figure in American literature but also a notable art collector and patron who played a crucial role in the Parisian avant-garde scene. Influenced by her experiences among European artists and writers, Stein's writings often delve into ideas of consciousness, language, and the nature of reality. Her life, marked by a commitment to experimentation and an appreciation for the absurd, mirrors the very complexity of her works, making her a pivotal figure in modernist literature. This collection is a must-read for those seeking to understand the evolution of 20th-century literature and the radical ideas that shaped it. Stein's ability to engage with language in a profoundly unique way invites readers to reconsider the boundaries of expression. Ideal for scholars and casual readers alike, this anthology serves not only as a testament to Stein's literary prowess but also as a rich resource for anyone looking to explore the foundations of modernist thought. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A comprehensive Introduction outlines these selected works' unifying features, themes, or stylistic evolutions. - The Author Biography highlights personal milestones and literary influences that shape the entire body of writing. - A Historical Context section situates the works in their broader era—social currents, cultural trends, and key events that underpin their creation. - A concise Synopsis (Selection) offers an accessible overview of the included texts, helping readers navigate plotlines and main ideas without revealing critical twists. - A unified Analysis examines recurring motifs and stylistic hallmarks across the collection, tying the stories together while spotlighting the different work's strengths. - Reflection questions inspire deeper contemplation of the author's overarching message, inviting readers to draw connections among different texts and relate them to modern contexts. - Lastly, our hand‐picked Memorable Quotes distill pivotal lines and turning points, serving as touchstones for the collection's central themes.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024
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GERTRUDE STEIN Ultimate Collection: Novels, Short Stories, Poetry, Plays, Memoirs & Essays
Table of Contents
Introduction
This collection gathers a wide arc of Gertrude Stein’s writing into a single, coherent volume, inviting readers to encounter her practice as an integrated whole. It presents long-form narrative alongside lyric condensation, dramatic experiment beside memoir and biography, to reveal the continuity of her inquiry into language, perception, and form. Rather than isolating a single masterpiece, the purpose here is to show how each part illuminates the others: the novels’ patience with repetition, the poems’ focus on naming, the plays’ emphasis on speech as action, and the reminiscences and portraits that bind art, life, and interpretation into a continuous project.
The range is deliberately expansive. It includes two major novels, a substantial gathering of poems and short prose, dramatic texts from brief playlets to longer theatrical works, memoirs, essays, and biographical studies. Within the poetry and prose sequences are works that blur genre boundaries, such as the interrelated pieces of Tender Buttons and the varied compositions grouped in Geography and Plays. The memoir and biographical writings extend her portrait method into sustained accounts of artists and of her own milieu. The result is not simply a compendium of titles, but a survey of the principal modes through which Stein shaped modernist literature.
The novels Three Lives and The Making of Americans mark Stein’s sustained engagement with narrative. Three Lives composes detailed portraits of three women, finding cadence in ordinary circumstance and testing how prose can hold attention through rhythm rather than plot. The Making of Americans undertakes an exhaustive examination of family, habit, and inheritance, using repetition and incremental variation to replace conventional storytelling with an anatomy of character and time. Together, they demonstrate Stein’s reinvention of the novel form: patient, recursive, and concerned with the structures by which people and histories are made recognizable to themselves and to others.
The poetic and short-prose works exemplify Stein’s radical attention to everyday language. Tender Buttons—organized as Objects, Food, and Rooms—renders the familiar strange by recombining words until new relations appear. Pieces such as Sacred Emily and IF I TOLD HIM: A Completed Portrait of Picasso pursue portraiture by sound and syntax rather than description. Across the poems, sustained focus on naming, rhythm, and reiteration displaces narrative in favor of perception. The play of resemblance and difference, the pressure of grammar, and the pleasures of cadence are the subjects as much as the means, and they make these texts central to understanding her method.
The dramatic writings extend Stein’s exploration of speech and structure into performance. Short pieces and playlets emphasize voices, refrains, and choral textures; they often stage conversation as a complex pattern rather than a vehicle for plot. Four Saints in Three Acts showcases her theatrical language at length, where repetition and shifting emphasis create movement through sound and grouping. Elsewhere, meta-theatrical pieces reflect on staging and audience, treating the theater as a space where language performs itself. In this context, action arises from arrangement and recurrence, turning listening into a primary dramatic experience and redefining what a play can accomplish.
Portraits and writings on artists form a bridge between literature and the visual arts. In essays, short portraits, and biographical studies such as Picasso and Portraits of Painters, Stein adapts her verbal method to describe artistic character and procedure. Names like Cezanne, Matisse, and Picasso anchor meditations on style, influence, and temperament. Related texts, including Matisse, Picasso and Gertrude Stein and individual portraits within Geography and Plays, demonstrate how she treats a person’s presence as a problem of form. Rather than offering conventional life-writing, these pieces pursue likeness through rhythm, iteration, and verbal planes that parallel painterly composition.
The memoir and reflective prose display Stein’s capacity to shape a public self while documenting an artistic community. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas presents recollection as a crafted narrative voice, turning memory into another form of portraiture. Shorter memoirs and occasional writings, including The Winner Loses, The Americans Are Coming, and Reflections on the Atomic Bomb, situate personal experience within larger historical and cultural currents. Essays on publishing and nations add a practical and critical dimension to her aesthetic concerns. Across these works, the boundary between personal testimony and formal experiment remains permeable, reinforcing her commitment to language as experience.
Geography and Plays and its related sequences gather a striking variety of scenes, national sketches, and linguistic studies. Sections devoted to places and peoples—France, Americans, Italians, England, Mexico, and Accents in Alsace—treat nations as arrangements of voices and habits rather than as fixed essences. Other pieces propose miniature theaters of perception, where brief episodes, dialogues, and portraits accumulate into a mosaic. Essays such as The Psychology of Nations or What Are You Looking At make explicit her interest in how collective identities are seen and named. Together these works map a world through language, assembling character from cadence and attention.
Across genres, distinctive formal features recur. Repetition and variation are structural, not decorative; they build meaning by accumulation and reposition expectation instead of confirming it. The so-called continuous present favors immediacy over retrospect, keeping attention on how a sentence proceeds rather than on what comes after. Stein’s prose often privileges parataxis, allowing phrases to meet without hierarchy, so that relations must be heard and felt. Portraiture—of persons, objects, rooms, and nations—becomes a method for testing how naming shapes recognition. In every mode, the work treats language as material, insisting that form and perception are inseparable in making experience.
Unifying themes emerge from these methods. Identity is approached as a pattern of habits and speech, not as a fixed essence; communities are heard as ensembles of cadence and emphasis. The everyday—tables, meals, clothing, errands—supplies inexhaustible occasions for re-seeing and re-saying. Art and life are mutually illuminating: writings on painters sharpen the poetics of the portraits, while the portraits clarify the critical prose. The plays and poems emphasize the sociality of language, how voices overlap and meanings circulate. Throughout, the work asks how attention, repetition, and naming construct the realities we inhabit, and how literature can reveal that process.
These writings remain significant because they enlarge the possibilities of prose, poetry, and theater. Stein’s commitment to experiment produced techniques now foundational to modernist and postwar aesthetics: non-narrative structure, linguistic foregrounding, and a revaluation of ordinary language. Her portraits propose an ethics of attention, while her essays model a criticism inseparable from practice. The interplay among novels, poems, plays, and biographies demonstrates how form migrates across genres, enabling innovations in one mode to reshape another. By assembling these works together, this collection clarifies the scope and coherence of her achievement and offers a durable framework for reading her influence.
Readers are encouraged to move both sequentially and across sections, tracing motifs as they recur and transform. One might begin with the concentrated experiments of Tender Buttons, then approach the novels with an ear tuned to repetition; or read the portraits of painters before turning to the biographical studies. The plays reward being read aloud, while the memoirs illuminate contexts for the experiments without reducing them. Taken together, these writings form a studio of language: a place to test perception, to experience form as thinking, and to discover how Gertrude Stein’s work continues to animate the practice of reading.
Author Biography
Gertrude Stein (1874–1946) was an American writer and central figure in international modernism, known for experimental prose, radical poetics, and a Paris-based literary life that helped shape twentieth-century art and letters. Living between the United States and France, she developed a style built on repetition, fragmentation, and what she called the “continuous present,” challenging narrative conventions and the boundaries between genres. Her circle included painters and writers who would become touchstones of modern culture, and she is often associated with the phrase “lost generation,” which Ernest Hemingway popularized and attributed to her. Stein’s works remain pivotal for understanding avant-garde aesthetics and the emergence of new forms of literary expression.
Stein’s education anchored her lifelong engagement with psychology, philosophy, and language. She studied at Radcliffe College in the 1890s, working under psychologist and philosopher William James, and co-authored an early research paper on automatic writing. She then attended Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, leaving before completing the degree. The rigor of psychological inquiry and exposure to pragmatist thought shaped her attention to perception, habit, and consciousness. After time in the United States, she settled in Paris in the early 1900s, where encounters with modern painting and the city’s international artistic milieu provided a decisive context for her literary experiments.
Stein’s early books announced a bold redefinition of prose. Three Lives offered innovative portraits of working women, while the monumental The Making of Americans used recursive syntax, cataloging, and repetition to explore inheritance, character, and social types. Tender Buttons distilled her radical approach into densely patterned prose poems about everyday objects, rooms, and food, foregrounding sound, rhythm, and the materiality of words over representational clarity. Her essays and lectures clarified these aims, insisting that composition could register lived time as a present-tense unfolding. Contemporary reception was divided—admiration among avant-garde circles contrasted with bewilderment from mainstream reviewers—yet her originality was unmistakable.
In Paris, Stein fostered a salon that brought together painters, writers, and composers who were reshaping modern culture. Regular contact with figures such as Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse, and with emerging American and European writers, helped place her work in dialogue with visual modernisms, especially Cubism. Stein’s experiments often paralleled painterly strategies—fractured perspective, iterative motif, and attention to surface—while her “portraits” of artists in prose sought to render identity as movement rather than essence. As a collector and interlocutor, she linked transatlantic communities, becoming a point of reference for students of modern art, literature, and the collaborative dynamics that energized both.
The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, written in Stein’s voice but presented as if by her long-time partner, brought her broad public attention in the early 1930s. Its success led to a lecture tour across the United States, later gathered in Lectures in America, where she explained her methods to audiences beyond specialist circles. Stein’s engagement with performance and music deepened through the libretto for Virgil Thomson’s opera Four Saints in Three Acts. Essays such as Composition as Explanation, along with books like How to Write, The Geographical History of America, and Everybody’s Autobiography, consolidated her reputation as a theorist-practitioner of experimental forms.
Stein remained in France during the Second World War, a period that produced Paris France and the memoiristic Wars I Have Seen. Her survival as a Jewish writer under occupation, and aspects of her political stances in those years, have been the subject of sustained scholarly debate. The wartime writings combine observation, irony, and a focus on daily life under strain, extending her interest in how language organizes perception. After the liberation, she continued to write, including works that reflected on soldiers and postwar realities. Reception of her wartime record remains mixed, with critics reading the texts alongside complex archival and historical evidence.
Stein’s later years were productive, and she remained a conspicuous voice in transatlantic letters until her death in the mid-1940s in France. Her legacy is robust: she is a foundational figure for literary modernism, feminist and queer studies, and subsequent avant-gardes that treat language as material. Poets and novelists from mid-century to the present draw on her techniques of repetition, parataxis, and defamiliarization. Read today in classrooms and interdisciplinary contexts, her works—ranging from narrative experiments to essays and operatic texts—invite readers to reconsider how meaning is made. Stein endures as an artist who turned attention itself into a subject and a method.
Historical Context
Gertrude Stein (1874–1946) emerged from late nineteenth-century America steeped in science and philosophy before she ever made a mark in literature. Born in Allegheny, Pennsylvania, and raised in Oakland, California, she studied psychology and philosophy with William James at Radcliffe College (1893–1897) and entered Johns Hopkins Medical School (1897–1901). The Jamesian emphasis on habit, attention, and the continuous flow of thought shaped her life-long experiments with language, identity, and perception. In 1903 she moved to Paris with her brother Leo Stein, establishing at 27 rue de Fleurus the base from which her fiction, prose-portraits, plays, and later memoirs and essays would help define transatlantic modernism.
From 1904 to 1914, Stein’s Paris salon became a crucible of the avant-garde. There she encountered Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, and Guillaume Apollinaire, while assembling a pioneering collection of paintings. Picasso’s 1905–1906 portrait of Stein, and the analytic experiments he and Braque pursued, paralleled her own drive to fracture and recompose perception in words. These years fostered her earliest major prose projects, including the stories later collected in Three Lives (1909) and the monumental family chronicle drafted as The Making of Americans (1903–1911), and seeded the methods that would reappear across her plays, verbal portraits, and essays on painters.
Stein’s most sustained method—what she called the “continuous present”—descended from William James’s psychology and the era’s fascination with scientific description. Rather than interior monologue in the novelistic sense, she stabilized attention on moments and habits, repeating phrases until they shed presupposed meanings. This approach allowed her to scrutinize American character and family formation during the Progressive Era, when immigration, urbanization, and social reform (roughly 1890–1920) transformed national life. Across novels, prose poems, and plays, she tests how identities are made and remade, not by plot but by iteration, producing a linguistic analogue to the patterned behaviors that modern social science was naming and measuring.
The modernist publishing ecosystem sustained Stein’s career. American little presses issued her most radical work when commercial houses balked. Tender Buttons appeared in New York in 1914 from the Claire Marie Press. Geography and Plays was published in Boston by the Four Seas Company in 1922, with a preface by Sherwood Anderson, helping to introduce her to U.S. readers. The Making of Americans reached print in Paris with Contact Editions in 1925, a watershed for her reputation among expatriates. In 1930 she and Alice B. Toklas founded the Plain Edition in Paris to circulate further manuscripts, consolidating a transatlantic network of small magazines and sympathetic printers.
World War I (1914–1918) was decisive in Stein’s understanding of nations and ordinary life under pressure. Remaining in France throughout the war, she and Toklas volunteered with the American Fund for French Wounded in 1917, delivering supplies by car to hospitals in the countryside. The practicalities of roads, towns, and voices—Alsace, the Rhône valley, the Jura—entered her ear and prose, recasting earlier aesthetic concerns as a grammar adequate to collective crisis. The war’s aftermath sharpened her interest in borders, accents, and the rhetoric by which nations imagine themselves, themes that surface in her geographically titled sketches and in later reflections on Europe’s political unraveling.
Stein’s writing was inseparable from the visual revolutions unfolding around her. Fauvism’s color and Cubism’s analytic fracture, seen in Matisse and Picasso after 1905, offered models for dismantling pictorial expectation that she translated into syntax, rhythm, and composition. Her verbal “portraits” of painters—Cézanne (1839–1906), Matisse (1869–1954), and Picasso (1881–1973)—and essays on the Paris art world document the cross-pollination of brush and sentence. A completed portrait in words of Picasso would later distill Cubist simultaneity into a lecture-like chant. Across decades, Stein returned to painters to test how description might both honor their difference and show that seeing—and saying—is always an active construction.
Iberia provided Stein with a counterpoint to Paris and a climate of forms that fed her experiments. She traveled in Spain before the First World War, visiting Catalonia and the Balearics, and later wrote about Mallorca. The Mediterranean’s light, the ceremonials of bullfighting, and the figure of Juan Belmonte (a matador whose fame crested in the 1910s and 1920s) supplied motifs of risk, ritual, and style. These Spanish engagements converse with Picasso’s Andalusian inheritance and the era’s taste for so-called primitivisms. The result is prose attentive to place-names, cadence, and spectacle, reworking travel writing, portraiture, and anecdote into forms that stage how a region performs itself.
Stein’s partnership with Alice B. Toklas, begun in Paris in 1907, anchored a domestic and intellectual economy that modernized intimate life on the page. In an era of coded language about sexuality, her prose used repetition, humor, and the everyday—chairs, cups, rooms—to make a new lyric of household space. One early story’s persistent use of “gay” marks a turning point in the public semantics of same-sex identity. Private objects and shared routines become the theater of affiliation and desire, not as confession but as a poetics of naming and renaming. This domestic modernism threads through her poems, plays, portraits, and later memoirs.
Stein was also a performer, and the sound of her writing mattered as much as the visual page. She cultivated a stylized reading voice in salons and lecture halls, synchronizing recurrence and surprise to the cadences of early radio and phonograph culture. Collaboration with the American composer Virgil Thomson culminated in Four Saints in Three Acts, premiered in Hartford on 7 February 1934 before moving to Broadway with an all–African American cast and witty, translucent designs by Florine Stettheimer. The libretto’s non-narrative repetitions and saintly names made music of sense and nonsense, translating her page-based procedures into a theatrical experience of rhythm and attention.
In the 1920s, Stein’s salon intersected with the expatriate Americans who came to be called the “Lost Generation,” a phrase Hemingway popularized after a remark Stein relayed. Writers such as Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald passed through 27 rue de Fleurus, absorbing her conviction that form precedes subject. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933) turned that private world public, recounting two decades of art and friendship while slyly narrating Stein’s own career in another’s voice. Its commercial success in the United States transformed her into a public intellectual and enabled a 1934–1935 lecture tour that carried her language experiments onto American stages and campuses.
The Depression decade reframed Stein’s Americanism. The crash of 1929 and the New Deal after 1933 recentered cultural production in the United States, and Stein engaged directly with American audiences, editors, and universities. She tuned her lectures and essays to the country’s regional accents and the bright vernacular of advertising and radio. Titles invoking Americans and America signal not only subject matter but an ear to national rhythm. That she announced, sometimes playfully and sometimes presciently, that “the Americans are coming” placed her within a wider 1930s imagination of U.S. ascendancy in arts and politics, even as Europe lurched toward catastrophe.
The 1930s in Europe forced Stein to confront art’s relation to crisis. She wrote her study Picasso in 1938 as Spain reeled from civil war (1936–1939) and as Guernica (1937) made painting a global political idiom. In France, the rise of fascism and the approach of war intensified questions about language’s ethical and national uses. During the German occupation, Stein and Toklas remained in the village of Bilignin (Ain), shielded in part by the Vichy official and scholar Bernard Faÿ, a connection that has drawn scrutiny. Her wartime stance and translations of Marshal Pétain’s speeches (prepared but not published then) complicate her legacy.
World War II (1939–1945) left deep traces in Stein’s late work. Living under occupation brought scarcity, fear, and intricate negotiations of identity, including the vulnerability of Jews in Vichy France. After the liberation of Paris in 1944 she reengaged with American forces and the changed Europe they occupied. The detonation of atomic bombs in August 1945 marked a threshold she addressed in her brief “Reflections on the Atomic Bomb,” registering astonishment and a modernist’s wary curiosity about technological totality. She died in Neuilly-sur-Seine on 27 July 1946 following surgery, leaving a body of work that had tracked two world wars and the transformations between them.
Stein’s procedures absorbed the tempo of modern technologies—automobiles, cinema, telegraphy—and the rhetoric of mass culture. Refrains echo the rhythms of factory repetition and advertising’s mnemonic insistence. When she named objects, foods, and rooms, she also cataloged a century that turned commodities and interiors into emblems of personality. Plays built from announcements, menus, or itineraries show how public language arranges experience. This attention to everyday diction allowed her to move between high avant-garde practice and the vernacular, so that a list or an advertisement might sit beside a painter’s portrait, each revealing how modern life is chanted into meaning.
As an art writer, Stein was uniquely placed. She knew the painters she described, collected their work early, and watched the public learn to see them. Cézanne’s structural vision, Matisse’s color, and Picasso’s analytic phase furnished her with a vocabulary for literary construction. Her Picasso (1938) and shorter portraits of painters document these revolutions from within the circle that made them, while also recording the social life—studios, cafés, dealers such as Ambroise Vollard and Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler—that enabled the new art. The mutuality is crucial: her prose teaches readers how to look, and painting teaches her how to compose what looking feels like.
Geography, for Stein, named a way of writing as much as a map of places. The Great War redrew borders; the Treaty of Versailles (1919) restored Alsace-Lorraine to France; the League of Nations (from 1920) reimagined diplomacy. Steamship timetables, passports, and customs regimes structured the lives of expatriates and visitors alike. Her sequences about Americans, French, English, and Italians set national voices in motion, while Mallorcan stories and essays on Spain probe how local color becomes style. By braiding scenes, accents, and lists of places, Stein built a literature of movement that captures Europe and America becoming newly legible to one another.
Across the works gathered here—from early prose experiments through plays, portraits, essays, and memoirs—Stein chronicles the long modernist century. The collection tracks her path from Gilded Age America to the interwar avant-garde and into the devastations and displacements of World War II. It registers the intellectual inheritance of William James, the painterly breakthroughs of Cézanne, Matisse, and Picasso, the sociabilities of 27 rue de Fleurus, the circuits of small presses, and the migrations of peoples and forms. What holds it together is a method: repetition as inquiry, attention as ethics, and language as the most precise instrument for mapping a world remade.
Synopsis (Selection)
Introduction
A brief orienting preface that situates Stein’s career, methods, and the scope of the collection, preparing readers for her experimental prose and verse.
A MESSAGE FROM GERTRUDE STEIN
A succinct author’s note that frames how to approach her work, emphasizing attention to language, repetition, and new ways of seeing.
THREE LIVES
Three novellas—The Good Anna, Melanctha, and The Gentle Lena—offer intimate portraits of working-class women in Bridgepoint, tracing love, duty, and constraint through Stein’s early realist-iterative style.
THE MAKING OF AMERICANS
A vast, repetitive chronicle of the Hersland and Dehning families that classifies habits and ‘types’ across generations to chart character formation and the idea of American identity.
TENDER BUTTONS
A tripartite suite of prose-poems that defamiliarizes everyday things, food, and spaces; Stein uses fractured syntax and refrain to reorient perception.
Tender Buttons — Objects
Brief verbal still lifes that recast household items through shifting description and rhythm rather than direct depiction.
Tender Buttons — Food
Compressed gustatory pieces that turn meals and ingredients into patterns of naming and sensation.
Tender Buttons — Rooms
Meditations on domestic spaces as arrangements of attention, where spatial order becomes linguistic composition.
MATISSE, PICASSO AND GERTRUDE STEIN
A memoiristic essay recounting Stein’s relationships with Matisse and Picasso, tracing aesthetic debates, rivalries, and the making of a modernist milieu.
A Long Gay Book
An extended prose-poem that cycles declarations and variations on joy, love, and naming to examine identity and social codes without conventional plot.
Many Many Women
A long serial composition of iterative portraits and statements about women and relationships, building meaning through accumulation and variation.
G.M.P.
An experimental sequence organized around initials and refrains, exploring how naming and repetition construct relations and perception.
GEOGRAPHY AND PLAYS
A heterogeneous collection of early mature work—word-portraits, travel pieces, poems, and short plays—showcasing Stein’s experiments with cadence, iteration, and staging.
Geography and Plays — Word Portraits and Experiments (including: Susie Asado; Ada; Miss Furr and Miss Skeene; Sacred Emily; IIIIIIIIII; One (Van Vechten); One (Harry Phelan Gibb))
Concise verbal portraits and language games that render acquaintances and ideas through rhythm and refrain rather than conventional description.
Geography and Plays — Artist and Society Portraits (including: Publishers, the Portrait Gallery, and the Manuscripts of the British Museum; Roche; Braque; Portrait of Prince B. D.; Mrs. Whitehead; Portrait of Constance Fletcher; A Poem about Walberg; Johnny Grey; A Portrait of F. B.)
Cubist-leaning prose portraits of artists, patrons, and social figures that emphasize temperament, milieu, and method over biography.
Geography and Plays — Places and Nations (including: France; Americans; Italians; England; Mallorcan Stories; Mexico; Land of Nations; Accents in Alsace; The Psychology of Nations or What Are You Looking At)
Compressed travel and nation sketches that distill collective temperament and landscape into iterative, aphoristic statements.
Geography and Plays — Stories, Scenes, and Sketches (including: A Collection; A Sweet Tail; The History of Belmonte; In the Grass; Scenes; The King or Something; A Family of Perhaps Three)
Brief narratives and vignettes that stage small events or motifs, foregrounding cadence and motif over plot resolution.
Geography and Plays — Plays and Dialogues (including: A Curtain Raiser; Ladies Voices; What Happened; White Wines; Do Let Us Go Away; For the Country Entirely; Turkey Bones and Eating and We Liked It; Every Afternoon; Captain Walter Arnold; Please Do Not Suffer; He Said It; Counting Her Dresses; I Like It to Be a Play; Not Sightly; Bonne Annee; Advertisements; Pink Melon Joy; If You Had Three Husbands; Work Again; Tourty or Tourtebattre; Next)
Short theatrical pieces and conversational experiments that test how meaning emerges from repetition, shifting speakers, and staged rhythm.
IF I TOLD HIM: A Completed Portrait of Picasso
A verbal portrait that loops conditional time and assertion to evoke Picasso’s authority and motion through cubist repetition.
FOUR SAINTS IN THREE ACTS
An opera libretto (set by Virgil Thomson) presenting St. Teresa, St. Ignatius, and others in non-linear tableaux that meditate on sainthood, community, and ritual language.
THE WINNER LOSES
A brief wartime reflection on the paradoxes of victory and defeat, considering how outcomes reverse expectations and values.
THE AMERICANS ARE COMING
Observations on American character and presence abroad—often in wartime contexts—sketching cultural traits and impending change.
REFLECTIONS ON THE ATOMIC BOMB
Terse, conversational remarks on the bomb and modern warfare that weigh technological novelty against human habit without prescriptive judgment.
THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF ALICE B. TOKLAS
A faux-memoir narrated in Alice B. Toklas’s voice that recounts Stein’s life, the Paris salon, and friendships with artists and writers through anecdote and wit.
PICASSO
A biographical-critical study tracing Picasso’s development and periods alongside Stein’s personal recollections, linking his method to broader modernist shifts.
PORTRAITS OF PAINTERS
A suite of prose portraits that translates visual style into verbal rhythm, emphasizing artists’ temperaments and working methods over chronology.
Portraits of Painters — Cezanne
A focused portrait casting Cézanne’s structural rigor as foundational to modern painting, conveyed through iterative prose.
Portraits of Painters — Matisse
An impressionistic account of Matisse’s sensibility and color, relating clarity and balance to Stein’s compositional ideas.
Portraits of Painters — Picasso
A compact portrait of Picasso’s restlessness and invention, aligning his fragmentation and energy with linguistic cubism.
GERTRUDE STEIN Ultimate Collection: Novels, Short Stories, Poetry, Plays, Memoirs & Essays
Introduction
A MESSAGE FROM GERTRUDE STEIN
I always wanted to be historical, from almost a baby on, I felt that way about it, and Carl was one of the earliest ones that made me be certain that I was going to be. When I was around fourteen I used to love to say to myself those awful lines of George Eliot, May I be one of those immortal something or other, I haven’t the poem here and although I knew then how it went I do not now, and then later when they used to ask me when I was going back to America, not until I am a lion, I said, I was not completely certain that I was going to be but now here I am, thank you all. How terribly exciting each one of these were, first there was the doing of them, the intense feeling that they made sense, then the doubt and then each time over again the intense feeling that they did make sense. It was Carl who arranged for the printing of Tender Buttons, he knew and what a comfort it was that there was the further knowing of the printed page, so naturally it was he that would choose and introduce because he was the first that made the first solemn contract and even though the editor did disappear, it was not before the edition was printed and distributed, wonderful days, and so little by little it was built up and all the time Carl wrote to me and I wrote to him and he always knew, and it was always a comfort and now he has put down all his knowledge of what I did and it is a great comfort. Then there was my first publisher who was commercial but who said he would print and he would publish even if he did not understand and if he did not make money, it sounds like a fairy tale but it is true, Bennett said, I will print a book of yours a year whatever it is and he has, and often I have worried but he always said there was nothing to worry about and there wasn’t. And now I am pleased here are the selected writings and naturally I wanted more, but I do and can say that all that are here are those that I wanted the most, thanks and thanks again.
GERTRUDE STEIN
Novels
THREE LIVES
Stories of The Good Anna, Melanctha and The Gentle Lena
Table of Contents
Donc je suis malheureux et ce n’est ni ma faute ni celle de la vie.
Jules Laforgue
Therefore I am unhappy and it is neither my fault nor that of life.
The Good Anna
Part I
The tradesmen of Bridgepoint learned to dread the sound of “Miss Mathilda”, for with that name the good Anna always conquered.
The strictest of the one price stores found that they could give things for a little less, when the good Anna had fully said that “Miss Mathilda” could not pay so much and that she could buy it cheaper “by Lindheims.”
Lindheims was Anna’s favorite store, for there they had bargain days, when flour and sugar were sold for a quarter of a cent less for a pound, and there the heads of the departments were all her friends and always managed to give her the bargain prices, even on other days.
Anna led an arduous and troubled life.
Anna managed the whole little house for Miss Mathilda. It was a funny little house, one of a whole row of all the same kind that made a close pile like a row of dominoes that a child knocks over, for they were built along a street which at this point came down a steep hill. They were funny little houses, two stories high, with red brick fronts and long white steps.
This one little house was always very full with Miss Mathilda, an under servant, stray dogs and cats and Anna’s voice that scolded, managed, grumbled all day long.
“Sallie! can’t I leave you alone a minute but you must run to the door to see the butcher boy come down the street and there is Miss Mathilda calling for her shoes. Can I do everything while you go around always thinking about nothing at all? If I ain’t after you every minute you would be forgetting all, the time, and I take all this pains, and when you come to me you was as ragged as a buzzard and as dirty as a dog. Go and find Miss Mathilda her shoes where you put them this morning.”
“Peter!” — her voice rose higher — “Peter!” — Peter was the youngest and the favorite dog — “Peter, if you don’t leave Baby alone,”— Baby was an old, blind terrier that Anna had loved for many years — “Peter if you don’t leave Baby alone, I take a rawhide to you, you bad dog.”
The good Anna had high ideals for canine chastity and discipline. The three regular dogs, the three that always lived with Anna, Peter and old Baby, and the fluffy little Rags, who was always jumping up into the air just to show that he was happy, together with the transients, the many stray ones that Anna always kept until she found them homes, were all under strict orders never to be bad one with the other.
A sad disgrace did once happen in the family. A little transient terrier for whom Anna had found a home suddenly produced a crop of pups. The new owners were certain that this Foxy had known no dog since she was in their care. The good Anna held to it stoutly that her Peter and her Rags were guiltless, and she made her statement with so much heat that Foxy’s owners were at last convinced that these results were due to their neglect.
“You bad dog,” Anna said to Peter that night, “you bad dog.”
“Peter was the father of those pups,” the good Anna explained to Miss Mathilda, “and they look just like him too, and poor little Foxy, they were so big that she could hardly have them, but Miss Mathilda, I would never let those people know that Peter was so bad.”
Periods of evil thinking came very regularly to Peter and to Rags and to the visitors within their gates. At such times Anna would be very busy and scold hard, and then too she always took great care to seclude the bad dogs from each other whenever she had to leave the house. Sometimes just to see how good it was that she had made them, Anna would leave the room a little while and leave them all together, and then she would suddenly come back. Back would slink all the wicked-minded dogs at the sound of her hand upon the knob, and then they would sit desolate in their corners like a lot of disappointed children whose stolen sugar has been taken from them.
Innocent blind old Baby was the only one who preserved the dignity becoming in a dog.
You see that Anna led an arduous and troubled life.
The good Anna was a small, spare, german woman, at this time about forty years of age. Her face was worn, her cheeks were thin, her mouth drawn and firm, and her light blue eyes were very bright. Sometimes they were full of lightning and sometimes full of humor, but they were always sharp and clear.
Her voice was a pleasant one, when she told the histories of bad Peter and of Baby and of little Rags. Her voice was a high and piercing one when she called to the teamsters and to the other wicked men, what she wanted that should come to them, when she saw them beat a horse or kick a dog. She did not belong to any society that could stop them and she told them so most frankly, but her strained voice and her glittering eyes, and her queer piercing german english first made them afraid and then ashamed. They all knew too, that all the policemen on the beat were her friends. These always respected and obeyed Miss Annie, as they called her, and promptly attended to all of her complaints.
For five years Anna managed the little house for Miss Mathilda. In these five years there were four different under servants.
The one that came first was a pretty, cheerful irish girl. Anna took her with a doubting mind. Lizzie was an obedient, happy servant, and Anna began to have a little faith. This was not for long. The pretty, cheerful Lizzie disappeared one day without her notice and with all her baggage and returned no more.
This pretty, cheerful Lizzie was succeeded by a melancholy Molly.
Molly was born in America, of german parents. All her people had been long dead or gone away. Molly had always been alone. She was a tall, dark, sallow, thin-haired creature, and she was always troubled with a cough, and she had a bad temper, and always said ugly dreadful swear words.
Anna found all this very hard to bear, but she kept Molly a long time out of kindness. The kitchen was constantly a battle-ground. Anna scolded and Molly swore strange oaths, and then Miss Mathilda would shut her door hard to show that she could hear it all.
At last Anna had to give it up. “Please Miss Mathilda won’t you speak to Molly,” Anna said, “I can’t do a thing with her. I scold her, and she don’t seem to hear and then she swears so that she scares me. She loves you Miss Mathilda, and you scold her please once.”
“But Anna,” cried poor Miss Mathilda, “I don’t want to,” and that large, cheerful, but faint hearted woman looked all aghast at such a prospect. “But you must, please Miss Mathilda!” Anna said.
Miss Mathilda never wanted to do any scolding. “But you must please Miss Mathilda,” Anna said.
Miss Mathilda every day put off the scolding, hoping always that Anna would learn to manage Molly better. It never did get better and at last Miss Mathilda saw that the scolding simply had to be.
It was agreed between the good Anna and her Miss Mathilda that Anna should be away when Molly would be scolded. The next evening that it was Anna’s evening out, Miss Mathilda faced her task and went down into the kitchen.
Molly was sitting in the little kitchen leaning her elbows on the table. She was a tall, thin, sallow girl, aged twenty-three, by nature slatternly and careless but trained by Anna into superficial neatness. Her drab striped cotton dress and gray black checked apron increased the length and sadness of her melancholy figure. “Oh, Lord!” groaned Miss Mathilda to herself as she approached her.
“Molly, I want to speak to you about your behaviour to Anna!”, here Molly dropped her head still lower on her arms and began to cry.
“Oh! Oh!” groaned Miss Mathilda.
“It’s all Miss Annie’s fault, all of it,” Molly said at last, in a trembling voice, “I do my best.”
“I know Anna is often hard to please,” began Miss Mathilda, with a twinge of mischief, and then she sobered herself to her task, “but you must remember, Molly, she means it for your good and she is really very kind to you.”
“I don’t want her kindness,” Molly cried, “I wish you would tell me what to do, Miss Mathilda, and then I would be all right. I hate Miss Annie.”
“This will never do Molly,” Miss Mathilda said sternly, in her deepest, firmest tones, “Anna is the head of the kitchen and you must either obey her or leave.”
“I don’t want to leave you,” whimpered melancholy Molly. “Well Molly then try and do better,” answered Miss Mathilda, keeping a good stern front, and backing quickly from the kitchen.
“Oh! Oh!” groaned Miss Mathilda, as she went back up the stairs.
Miss Mathilda’s attempt to make peace between the constantly contending women in the kitchen had no real effect. They were very soon as bitter as before.
At last it was decided that Molly was to go away. Molly went away to work in a factory in the town, and she went to live with an old woman in the slums, a very bad old woman Anna said.
Anna was never easy in her mind about the fate of Molly. Sometimes she would see or hear of her. Molly was not well, her cough was worse, and the old woman really was a bad one.
After a year of this unwholesome life, Molly was completely broken down. Anna then again took her in charge. She brought her from her work and from the woman where she lived, and put her in a hospital to stay till she was well. She found a place for her as nursemaid to a little girl out in the country, and Molly was at last established and content.
Molly had had, at first, no regular successor. In a few months it was going to be the summer and Miss Mathilda would be gone away, and old Katie would do very well to come in every day and help Anna with her work.
Old Katy was a heavy, ugly, short and rough old german woman, with a strange distorted german-english all her own. Anna was worn out now with her attempt to make the younger generation do all that it should and rough old Katy never answered back, and never wanted her own way. No scolding or abuse could make its mark on her uncouth and aged peasant hide. She said her “Yes, Miss Annie,” when an answer had to come, and that was always all that she could say.
“Old Katy is just a rough old woman, Miss Mathilda,” Anna said, “but I think I keep her here with me. She can work and she don’t give me trouble like I had with Molly all the time.”
Anna always had a humorous sense from this old Katy’s twisted peasant english, from the roughness on her tongue of buzzing s’s and from the queer ways of her brutish servile humor. Anna could not let old Katy serve at table — old Katy was too coarsely made from natural earth for that — and so Anna had all this to do herself and that she never liked, but even then this simple rough old creature was pleasanter to her than any of the upstart young.
Life went on very smoothly now in these few months before the summer came. Miss Mathilda every summer went away across the ocean to be gone for several months. When she went away this summer old Katy was so sorry, and on the day that Miss Mathilda went, old Katy cried hard for many hours. An earthy, uncouth, servile peasant creature old Katy surely was. She stood there on the white stone steps of the little red brick house, with her bony, square dull head with its thin, tanned, toughened skin and its sparse and kinky grizzled hair, and her strong, squat figure a little overmade on the right side, clothed in her blue striped cotton dress, all clean and always washed but rough and harsh to see — and she stayed there on the steps till Anna brought her in, blubbering, her apron to her face, and making queer guttural broken moans.
When Miss Mathilda early in the fall came to her house again old Katy was not there.
“I never thought old Katy would act so Miss Mathilda,” Anna said, “when she was so sorry when you went away, and I gave her full wages all the summer, but they are all alike Miss Mathilda, there isn’t one of them that’s fit to trust. You know how Katy said she liked you, Miss Mathilda, and went on about it when you went away and then she was so good and worked all right until the middle of the summer, when I got sick, and then she went away and left me all alone and took a place out in the country, where they gave her some more money. She didn’t say a word, Miss Mathilda, she just went off and left me there alone when I was sick after that awful hot summer that we had, and after all we done for her when she had no place to go, and all summer I gave her better things to eat than I had for myself. Miss Mathilda, there isn’t one of them has any sense of what’s the right way for a girl to do, not one of them.”
Old Katy was never heard from any more.
No under servant was decided upon now for several months. Many came and many went, and none of them would do. At last Anna heard of Sallie.
Sallie was the oldest girl in a family of eleven and Sallie was just sixteen years old. From Sallie down they came always littler and littler in her family, and all of them were always out at work excepting only the few littlest of them all.
Sallie was a pretty blonde and smiling german girl, and stupid and a little silly. The littler they came in her family the brighter they all were. The brightest of them all was a little girl of ten. She did a good day’s work washing dishes for a man and wife in a saloon, and she earned a fair day’s wage, and then there was one littler still. She only worked for half the day. She did the house work for a bachelor doctor. She did it all, all of the housework and received each week her eight cents for her wage. Anna was always indignant when she told that story.
“I think he ought to give her ten cents Miss Mathilda any way. Eight cents is so mean when she does all his work and she is such a bright little thing too, not stupid like our Sallie. Sallie would never learn to do a thing if I didn’t scold her all the time, but Sallie is a good girl, and I take care and she will do all right.”
Sallie was a good, obedient german child. She never answered Anna back, no more did Peter, old Baby and little Rags and so though always Anna’s voice was sharply raised in strong rebuke and worn expostulation, they were a happy family all there together in the kitchen.
Anna was a mother now to Sallie, a good incessant german mother who watched and scolded hard to keep the girl from any evil step. Sallie’s temptations and transgressions were much like those of naughty Peter and jolly little Rags, and Anna took the same way to keep all three from doing what was bad.
Sallie’s chief badness besides forgetting all the time and never washing her hands clean to serve at table, was the butcher boy.
He was an unattractive youth enough, that butcher boy. Suspicion began to close in around Sallie that she spent the evenings when Anna was away, in company with this bad boy.
“Sallie is such a pretty girl, Miss Mathilda,” Anna said, “and she is so dumb and silly, and she puts on that red waist, and she crinkles up her hair with irons so I have to laugh, and then I tell her if she only washed her hands clean it would be better than all that fixing all the time, but you can’t do a thing with the young girls nowadays Miss Mathilda. Sallie is a good girl but I got to watch her all the time.”
Suspicion closed in around Sallie more and more, that she spent Anna’s evenings out with this boy sitting in the kitchen. One early morning Anna’s voice was sharply raised.
“Sallie this ain’t the same banana that I brought home yesterday, for Miss Mathilda, for her breakfast, and you was out early in the street this morning, what was you doing there?”
“Nothing, Miss Annie, I just went out to see, that’s all and that’s the same banana, ‘deed it is Miss Annie.”
“Sallie, how can you say so and after all I do for you, and Miss Mathilda is so good to you. I never brought home no bananas yesterday with specks on it like that. I know better, it was that boy was here last night and ate it while I was away, and you was out to get another this morning. I don’t want no lying Sallie.”
Sallie was stout in her defence but then she gave it up and she said it was the boy who snatched it as he ran away at the sound of Anna’s key opening the outside door. “But I will never let him in again, Miss Annie, ‘deed I won’t,” said Sallie.
And now it was all peaceful for some weeks and then Sallie with fatuous simplicity began on certain evenings to resume her bright red waist, her bits of jewels and her crinkly hair.
One pleasant evening in the early spring, Miss Mathilda was standing on the steps beside the open door, feeling cheerful in the pleasant, gentle night. Anna came down the street, returning from her evening out. “Don’t shut the door, please, Miss Mathilda,” Anna said in a low voice, “I don’t want Sallie to know I’m home.”
Anna went softly through the house and reached the kitchen door. At the sound of her hand upon the knob there was a wild scramble and a bang, and then Sallie sitting there alone when Anna came into the room, but, alas, the butcher boy forgot his overcoat in his escape.
You see that Anna led an arduous and troubled life.
Anna had her troubles, too, with Miss Mathilda. “And I slave and slave to save the money and you go out and spend it all on foolishness,” the good Anna would complain when her mistress, a large and careless woman, would come home with a bit of porcelain, a new etching and sometimes even an oil painting on her arm.
“But Anna,” argued Miss Mathilda, “if you didn’t save this money, don’t you see I could not buy these things,” and then Anna would soften and look pleased until she learned the price, and then wringing her hands, “Oh, Miss Mathilda, Miss Mathilda,” she would cry, “and you gave all that money out for that, when you need a dress to go out in so bad.” “Well, perhaps I will get one for myself next year, Anna,” Miss Mathilda would cheerfully concede. “If we live till then Miss Mathilda, I see that you do,” Anna would then answer darkly.
Anna had great pride in the knowledge and possessions of her cherished Miss Mathilda, but she did not like her careless way of wearing always her old clothes. “You can’t go out to dinner in that dress, Miss Mathilda,” she would say, standing firmly before the outside door, “You got to go and put on your new dress you always look so nice in.” “But Anna, there isn’t time.” “Yes there is, I go up and help you fix it, please Miss Mathilda you can’t go out to dinner in that dress and next year if we live till then, I make you get a new hat, too. It’s a shame Miss Mathilda to go out like that.”
The poor mistress sighed and had to yield. It suited her cheerful, lazy temper to be always without care but sometimes it was a burden to endure, for so often she had it all to do again unless she made a rapid dash out of the door before Anna had a chance to see.
Life was very easy always for this large and lazy Miss Mathilda, with the good Anna to watch and care for her and all her clothes and goods. But, alas, this world of ours is after all much what it should be and cheerful Miss Mathilda had her troubles too with Anna.
It was pleasant that everything for one was done, but annoying often that what one wanted most just then, one could not have when one had foolishly demanded and not suggested one’s desire. And then Miss Mathilda loved to go out on joyous, country tramps when, stretching free and far with cheerful comrades, over rolling hills and cornfields, glorious in the setting sun, and dogwood white and shining underneath the moon and clear stars over head, and brilliant air and tingling blood, it was hard to have to think of Anna’s anger at the late return, though Miss Mathilda had begged that there might be no hot supper cooked that night. And then when all the happy crew of Miss Mathilda and her friends, tired with fullness of good health and burning winds and glowing sunshine in the eyes, stiffened and justly worn and wholly ripe for pleasant food and gentle content, were all come together to the little house — it was hard for all that tired crew who loved the good things Anna made to eat, to come to the closed door and wonder there if it was Anna’s evening in or out, and then the others must wait shivering on their tired feet, while Miss Mathilda softened Anna’s heart, or if Anna was well out, boldly ordered youthful Sallie to feed all the hungry lot.
Such things were sometimes hard to bear and often grievously did Miss Mathilda feel herself a rebel with the cheerful Lizzies, the melancholy Mollies, the rough old Katies and the stupid Sallies.
Miss Mathilda had other troubles too, with the good Anna. Miss Mathilda had to save her Anna from the many friends, who in the kindly fashion of the poor, used up her savings and then gave her promises in place of payments.
The good Anna had many curious friends that she had found in the twenty years that she had lived in Bridgepoint, and Miss Mathilda would often have to save her from them all.
Part II
The Life of the Good Anna
Anna Federner, this good Anna, was of solid lower middle-class south german stock.
When she was seventeen years old she went to service in a bourgeois family, in the large city near her native town, but she did not stay there long. One day her mistress offered her maid — that was Anna — to a friend, to see her home. Anna felt herself to be a servant, not a maid, and so she promptly left the place.
Anna had always a firm old world sense of what was the right way for a girl to do.
No argument could bring her to sit an evening in the empty parlour, although the smell of paint when they were fixing up the kitchen made her very sick, and tired as she always was, she never would sit down during the long talks she held with Miss Mathilda. A girl was a girl and should act always like a girl, both as to giving all respect and as to what she had to eat.
A little time after she left this service, Anna and her mother made the voyage to America. They came second-class, but it was for them a long and dreary journey. The mother was already ill with consumption.
They landed in a pleasant town in the far South and there the mother slowly died.
Anna was now alone and she made her way to Bridgepoint where an older half brother was already settled. This brother was a heavy, lumbering, good natured german man, full of the infirmity that comes of excess of body.
He was a baker and married and fairly well to do.
Anna liked her brother well enough but was never in any way dependent on him.
When she arrived in Bridgepoint, she took service with Miss Mary Wadsmith.
Miss Mary Wadsmith was a large, fair, helpless woman, burdened with the care of two young children. They had been left her by her brother and his wife who had died within a few months of each other.
Anna soon had the household altogether in her charge.
Anna found her place with large, abundant women, for such were always lazy, careless or all helpless, and so the burden of their lives could fall on Anna, and give her just content. Anna’s superiors must be always these large helpless women, or be men, for none others could give themselves to be made so comfortable and free.
Anna had no strong natural feeling to love children, as she had to love cats and dogs, and a large mistress. She never became deeply fond of Edgar and Jane Wadsmith. She naturally preferred the boy, for boys love always better to be done for and made comfortable and full of eating, while in the little girl she had to meet the feminine, the subtle opposition, showing so early always in a young girl’s nature.
For the summer, the Wadsmiths had a pleasant house out in the country, and the winter months they spent in hotel apartments in the city.
Gradually it came to Anna to take the whole direction of their movements, to make all the decisions as to their journeyings to and fro, and for the arranging of the places where they were to live.
Anna had been with Miss Mary for three years, when little Jane began to raise her strength in opposition. Jane was a neat, pleasant little girl, pretty and sweet with a young girl’s charm, and with two blonde braids carefully plaited down her back.
Miss Mary, like her Anna, had no strong natural feeling to love children, but she was fond of these two young ones of her blood, and yielded docilely to the stronger power in the really pleasing little girl. Anna always preferred the rougher handling of the boy, while Miss Mary found the gentle force and the sweet domination of the girl to please her better.
In a spring when all the preparations for the moving had been made, Miss Mary and Jane went together to the country home, and Anna, after finishing up the city matters was to follow them in a few days with Edgar, whose vacation had not yet begun.
