The Letters of Gertrude Stein and Carl Van Vechten, 1913-1946

This monumental collection of correspondence between Gertrude Stein and critic, novelist, and photographer Carl Van Vechten provides crucial insight into Stein's life, art, and artistic milieu as well as Van Vechten's support of major cultural projects, such as the Harlem Renaissance. From their first meeting in 1913, Stein and Van Vechten formed a unique and powerful relationship, and Van Vechten worked vigorously to publish and promote Stein's work. Existing biographies of Stein—including her own autobiographical writings—omit a great deal about her experiences and thought. They lack the ordinary detail of what Stein called "daily everyday living": the immediate concerns, objects, people, and places that were the grist for her writing. These letters not only vividly represent those details but also showcase Stein and Van Vechten's private selves as writers. Edward Burns's extensive annotations include detailed cross-referencing of source materials.

Edward Burns is professor of English at William Paterson University and editor of A Tour of the Darkling Plain: The "Finnegans Wake" Letters of Thornton Wilder and Adaline Glasheen; A Passion for Joyce: The Letters of Hugh Kenner and Adaline Glasheen; and The Letters of Gertrude Stein and Thornton Wilder.

Scholars will be grateful for Burns's thoroughly annotated and comprehensive volume.

Burns's patient attention to details makes this an important reference for studies of Stein's literary texts, and its editorial precision sets a much-needed standard for future editions of Stein.

Important... detailed and copious annotations plus cross-references supplement the first-rate editorial job.... The correspondence tells the story of a writer sustaining her hard-won independence and a supporter who tirelessly promoted her work.

Burns's editing is a monument of patient scholarship.

Catharine R. Stimpson, New York University:
The Stein–Van Vechten letters reveal, afresh and anew, the world of twentieth-century genius and bohemia. Edward Burns has edited this human archive with the deeply-informed precision of a leading Stein scholar.

[Burns] has arranged and annotated these [letters] with extraordinary skill and diligence.