Prepare for Saints: Gertrude Stein, Virgil Thomson, and the Mainstreaming of American Modernism

by Steven Watson

Book Overview

Perhaps the oddest and most influential collaboration in the history of American modernism was hatched in 1926, when a young Virgil Thomson knocked on Gertrude Stein's door in Paris. Eight years later, their opera Four Saints in Three Acts became a sensation--the longest-running opera in Broadway history to date and the most widely reported cultural event of its time. Prepare for Saints is Steven Watson's brilliant and absorbing account...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0520223535
• ISBN13: 9780520223530
• Release Date: July 1995
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Length: 380 Pages
• Weight: 1.40 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

Fascinating cultural history

I came to this book hoping to learn about the creation and production of Stein's opera, and I was not disappointed. I thought the book delivered that information, and more. Watson writes well, and he tells a fascinating story of the complicated network of interpersonal relationships that were finally led this unlikely opera into production. I think Watson understands the nature of Stein's as well as anybody, although the focus of the book was not on the way the opera was written. He manages to express the way that all the participants were inspired by Stein's words in different ways, the "miracle" of their all having "to create and all of them did."