STEIN, Gertrude

Stein was, simply, the Great American Person-of-Avant-Garde Letters in that she produced distinguished work in poetry as well as prose, theater as well as criticism, nearly all of it unconventional, if not decidedly avant-garde. Stein could not write an ordinary sentence if she tried, for, though her diction is mundane and her vocabulary nearly always accessible, her sentence structures are not. One early development, evident in Three Lives (drafted around 1904), was the shifting of syntax, so that...