Author Top Five:
Francesca Wade’s Gertrude Stein Cultural Picks
By Faber Editor, 20 May 2025
Francesca Wade, author of the luminescent Gertrude Stein: A Life, shares her top five Stein-inspired cultural highlights, from operas, recordings and novels to quilts and more.
Gertrude Stein reading
The Penn Sounds website is a treasure trove of radio history and features hundreds of recordings of poets reading their work. I love these clips of Stein, recorded in New York during her seven-month tour of America promoting her bestselling memoir. On the page, Stein’s work can be intimidating, but read aloud, the rhythms, humour and pleasure in language come through wonderfully. Her interviews with bemused journalists are worth listening to, too: ‘If you enjoy it you understand it,’ she insists.
Four Saints in Three Acts
This unconventional opera – a collaboration between Stein and the composer Virgil Thomson – took Broadway by storm when it was performed in 1934; it became a cultural sensation, the longest-running opera in the city’s history. On YouTube you can see a short clip of the original performance, featuring a chorus of black singers and Florine Stettheimer’s cellophane extravaganza set. A more recent recording of the whole opera is also available – its blend of marching songs, Southern Baptist hymns, drinking songs and nursery rhymes is extremely catchy, while Stein’s language is full of delightful wordplay and striking imagery, as her saints enjoy themselves in a stream of ‘idle acts’.
Monique Truong, The Book of Salt
Truong’s brilliant novel imagines life at 27 rue de Fleurus from the perspective of Binh, a Vietnamese cook hired to work in the Stein-Toklas kitchen. It takes its cue from real events – Stein wrote about their cook Trac in her memoir Everybody’s Autobiography, while Toklas recalls his cooking in The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book – but this is a piercing examination of class, colonialism and the power of storytelling, as well as a richly imagined portrait of life for an immigrant worker in 1920s Paris, and an intimate and well-researched depiction of Stein and Toklas – Binh’s eccentric ‘mesdames’ – behind closed doors.
Faith Ringgold, Dinner at Gertrude Stein’s
Of the many imaginative contemporary responses to Stein and her milieu, one of my favourites is Faith Ringgold’s quilt Dinner at Gertrude Stein’s (1991). It’s part of a series titled The French Connection, in which her protagonist, Willia Marie Simone, sets out from Harlem to Paris in the hope of making it as an artist. She models for Matisse, visits Picasso’s studio, attends Josephine Baker’s birthday party – and attends a salon at the rue de Fleurus, where Ringgold depicts a crowd including Zora Neale Hurston, James Baldwin and Langston Hughes as well as Stein, Toklas, Hemingway and Picasso. It’s an intriguing counter-narrative to history, and a celebration of cross-generational Black creativity.
Gertrude Stein, Every Day Is To-Day
I edited this collection of some of Stein’s most shimmering short works – her ‘portraits’ of friends, her ‘plays’, a scenario for an unrealised movie and her abstract word-compositions which sought to convey the movement and essence of a person, object or landscape, rather than action. Among them is ‘Ada’, Stein’s very first portrait – a depiction of her partner Alice B. Toklas, composed in the early years of their relationship, whose ‘autobiography’ she famously went on to write. These are the texts Stein called her ‘real’ work – the record of decades of daily ‘meditation’, bent on achieving a wholly new form of literature.
Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife is out now in hardback, ebook and audio.
Exclusive Offer: the first one hundred readers to order this title from faber.co.uk will receive a limited-run, hand-printed letterpress print featuring an extract from Stein’s Tender Buttons, selected by Francesca Wade. Please note full details on the book page here.
Exclusive Offer: the first one hundred readers to order this title from faber.co.uk will receive a limited-run, hand-printed letterpress print featuring an extract from Stein’s Tender Buttons, selected by Francesca Wade. Please note full details below.
Francesca Wade is the author of Square Haunting: Five Women, Freedom and London Between the Wars (2020), which was longlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize and shortlisted for the RSL Ondaatje Prize. She has received fellowships from the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center at the New York Public Library, the Leon Levy Center for Biography and the Harvard Radcliffe Institute, and her work has appeared in The New York Review of Books, London Review of Books, Granta and other places. She lives in London.
Read More