Gertrude Stein Will get a Snarky Rejection Letter from a Writer (1912)

Gertrude Stein con­sid­ered her­self an exper­i­males­tal author and wrote what The Poet­ry Foun­da­tion calls “dense poems and fic­tions, usually devoid of plot or dia­logue,” with the outcome being that “com­mer­cial pub­lish­ers slight­ed her exper­i­males­tal writ­ings and crit­ics dis­missed them as incom­pre­hen­si­ble.” Take, for examination­ple, what hap­pened when Stein despatched a person­u­script to Alfred C. Fifield, a Lon­don-based pub­lish­er, and acquired a rejec­tion let­ter mock­ing her prose in return. Accord­ing to Let­ters of Word, the person­u­script in ques­tion was pub­lished a few years lat­er as her mod­ernist nov­el, The Mak­ing of Amer­i­cans: Being a His­to­ry of a Fam­i­ly’s Progress (1925). You may hear Stein learn­ing a selec­tion from the nov­el under.