STEIN, Gertrude.

Inquire · Offered by Peter Harrington

Three Lives. Stories of the Good Anna, Melanctha and the Gentle Lena. Fourth edition, presentation copy, inscribed by Stein on the front free endpaper, "To René Crevel, my first book with much affection. Read the second Melanctha, the [?] story, and best of good bunch. Gertrude Stein". Stein met Crevel through Paris artistic circles in the 1920s, and he attended her salons. An under studied figure in the Dada and Surrealist movements, Crevel's novels deal with his Communist beliefs and his bisexuality."If you look at the photograph of leading Surrealist artists and writers, taken in 1932 at Tristan Tzara's, you will find René Crevel in the back row, and that is where he long remained" (Winegarten, p. 1). After committing suicide by the method he had described in his first novel - in Détours (1924) the protagonist turns on the gas stove - Crevel's reputation as a novelist did not resurface until the 1960s.Three Lives follows a trilogy of women struggling to live in a fictionalised Baltimore. Its radical style attracted both criticism and interest from the well-known American authors to whom Stein sent the book on its first publication in 1909, yet is now considered the most accessible of her modernist novels.

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