Everybody's Autobiography

Everybodys Autobiography is among the very best of Gertrudes writing--[it] speaks with the true and original voice of Gertrude Stein, without apparent art or bravado. --Janet Hobhouse~In 1937, Gertrude Stein wrote a sequel to The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, but this darker and more complex work was long misunderstood and neglected. An account of her experiences as a result of writing a bestseller, Everybodys Autobiography is as funny and engaging as The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, but it is also a searing meditation on the meaning of success and identity in America. Posing as the representative American, Stein transforms her story into history--responding to the tradition of Thoreau and Henry Adams, she writes: "I used to be fond of saying that America, which was supposed to be a land of success, was a land of failure. Most of the great men in America had a long life of early failure and a long life of later failure." Everybodys Autobiography is Stein at her most accessible and her most serious, and may yet prove to be among her most popular books.