Now The Library of America presents a full-scale gathering of Stein's achievement. This two-volume set surveys a literary trajectory that from the beginning of the 20th century to the end of World War II marked her as a fearless and uncompromising experimenter and a master of anecdote and aphorism.

The first volume, Writings 1903-1932, takes Stein from her first, more traditional fictional works to the exuberant and astonishing experiments of the early Paris years. In her early work she sought a new kind of realism exemplified here by Q.E.D., a novel (not published until after her death) about lesbian relationships at college, and the modern classic Three Lives, a set of novellas about the lives of three ordinary women, described in the simplest and most direct of prose.

In her brilliant "portraits" Stein evokes those friends and collaborators--Matisse, Picasso, Apollinaire, Juan Gris, Satie, Mabel Dodge Luhan, Carl Van Vechten, Sherwood Anderson, Virgil Thomson--with whom she shared decades of revolutionary ferment in the arts. Her plays, including the famous Four Saints in Three Acts, are written for a freewheeling theater of the mind where everything becomes possible. In Lifting Belly and other works she joyously celebrates her lifelong relationship with Alice B. Toklas, one of the most famous domestic partnerships of this century. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Stein's oblique and playful memoir of her years in Paris, became a bestseller when published in 1933 and sealed Stein's international celebrity.

This two-volume set surveys a literary trajectory that from the beginning of the 20th century to the end of World War II marked her as a fearless and uncompromising experimenter. The second volume includes, among other works of her later years, Stanzas in Meditation, perhaps her most austere and rigorous linguistic experiment; Lectures in America and The Geographical History of America, the brilliant works in which she made the most of her newfound status as a public figure; Picasso, her study of the painter who was one of her closest associates; the children's book The World Is Round; Ida, an enchanting exercise in pure verbal invention; the most important of her later plays, Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights and The Mother of Us All(inspired by the life of Susan B. Anthony); and her last major work, Brewsie and Willie, a remarkable evocation of the speech and aspirations of the American GIs she came to know after the liberation of France.