American Puppet Modernism in the 1930s: Gertrude Stein’s Identity

Abstract

In the fall of 1934, when Gertrude Stein undertook a lecture tour of United States, she was the American writer who, since the beginning of the century, had most clearly broken with traditional art to make her work a critical fulcrum of modernism. In Chicago she first met (and enthralled) Thornton Wilder, but also had an effect on scores of other Midwesterners who were fascinated and inspired by modernist approaches to art and literature that she represented. Stein’s unprecedented opera Four Saints in Three Acts (with music by Virgil Thomson) had premiered the preceding February at the Wadsworth Athenaeum in Hartford, Connecticut, after which it had moved to Broadway—a stunning example of the possible popularity of avant-garde theatre—and during Stein’s sojourn in Chicago Four Saints premiered there as well.