The author of a groundbreaking new biography discusses one of the most influential literary figures of the 20th century and the fight to ensure her legacy.

In-person registration for this event has sold out, but livestream tickets are still available. A limited number of standby tickets may be available on the night of the event.

Gertrude Stein’s Paris salon is the stuff of literary legend. Many have tried to capture the spirit of the place that once entertained the likes of Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Pablo Picasso, and Henri Matisse, but perhaps none as determinedly as Stein herself. A genius to her admirers, a charlatan to her detractors, Stein achieved international celebrity in 1933 with her bestselling memoir, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, written in the voice of her devoted partner. After Stein’s death in 1946, Toklas made it her mission to shepherd all of Stein’s unpublished writing into print—all the while negotiating her own fraught role in the complex mythology they had built together. Pushing beyond the conventions of literary biography to explore the nature of legacy and memory itself, Francesca Wade uncovers the origins of Stein’s radical writing and reveals new depths to the storied relationship that made it possible.

Francesca Wade worked on Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife during her 2022-2023 term as the Jean Strouse Fellow at the Library's Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers. She will discuss her book with award-winning author Brenda Wineapple.

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ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

Francesca Wade is the author of Square Haunting: Five Writers in London Between the Wars. She has received fellowships from the Leon Levy Center for Biography and the Harvard Radcliffe Institute, and her writing has appeared in the New York Review of Books, London Review of Books, Paris Review, Granta, and elsewhere.

Brenda Wineapple is the author, most recently, of the national bestseller, Keeping the Faith: God, Democracy, and the Trial That Riveted a Nation, named a best book of 2024 by the New Yorker. Her previous books include The Impeachers: The Trial of Andrew Johnson and the Dream of a Just Nation and Ecstatic Nation: Confidence, Crisis, and Compromise, 1848–1877, both of them named New York Times Notable Books; White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; and Sister Brother: Gertrude and Leo Stein. She has received a Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Pushcart Prize, an American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship, two Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, and a National Endowment Public Scholars Award. A Cullman Center Fellow in 2023-2024, she’s an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and regularly contributes to the New York Times Book Review, the New York Review of Books, and the Wall Street Journal.

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ACCESSIBILITY

In-Person | Assistive listening devices and/or hearing loops are available at the venue. You can request a free ASL (American Sign Language) interpretation or CART (Communication Access Real-Time Translation) captioning service by emailing your request at least two weeks in advance of the event: email accessibility@nypl.org or use this Gmail template. This venue is fully accessible to wheelchairs.

Livestream | Captions and a transcript will be provided. Media used over the course of the conversation will be accompanied by alt text and/or audio description. You can request a free ASL (American Sign Language) interpretation by emailing your request at least two weeks in advance of the event: email accessibility@nypl.org or use this Gmail template.

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The Cullman Center is made possible by a generous endowment from Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman in honor of Brooke Russell Astor, with major support provided by Mrs. John L. Weinberg, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, The Estate of Charles J. Liebman, The von der Heyden Family Foundation, John and Constance Birkelund, and The Samuel I. Newhouse Foundation, and with additional gifts from Helen and Roger Alcaly, The Rona Jaffe Foundation, The Arts and Letters Foundation Inc., William W. Karatz, Merilee and Roy Bostock, and Cullman Center Fellows.