Everybody’s Autobiography

In 1937 Gertrude Stein wrote a sequel to The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, but this darker and more complex work has been long misunderstood and neglected. An account of her experiences as a result of writing a bestseller, Everybody’s 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.” Everybody’s Autobiography is Stein at her most accessible and her most serious; it should prove to be among her most popular books.