Gertrude Stein
Gertrude Stein (1874 - 1946) was an American author who lived in Paris, France, and is best remembered for creating deliberate linguistic conundrums.
Stein's most famous work was a best seller, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, published in 1933.
Stein's possibly least famous book, published in 1947, was entitled Four in America; it consisted of four subdivisions purporting to be about “Wilbur Wright”, “Henry James”, "Ulysses Grant" and “George Washington”. As of 2020, Four in America is out of print, has never been digitized, and is likely to be found in only two or three libraries in the United States[1]. Even used copies via the internet are difficult to come by.
Four in America is now something of a curiosity, because a single sentence of that book has become a much misquoted and always misrepresented internet meme. Some claim that Stein said she admired Ulysses S. Grant; others claim that Stein said she could not “think of Grant without weeping”. The actual sentence which this meme sprang from is to be found in the quarter of the book allegedly devoted to Grant, on the 77th and last page, and reads: “I cannot think of Ulysses Simpson Grant without tears.” But do not be deceived by that apparently lucid statement; it perches atop one of the most abstruse, dense, and discouraging paragraphs ever written in the English language:
(quote the paragraph here)
Notes
- ↑ A copy of Four in America exists in the Philadelphia Free Library, and also in the Princeton University Library