FINAL_Cerf-Stein-Modernist Star_Journal Modern Lit.pdf (1.84 MB)
Shucks, we've got glamour girls too! Gertrude Stein, Bennett Cerf and the culture of celebrity
© The Trustees of Indiana University. September 1933 was a turning point in Gertrude Stein's career. That month, Alfred Harcourt published The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas and Bennett Cerf issued Three Lives in the Modern Library, a series of cheap reprints marketed as "the world's best books." While most scholars have linked Stein's celebrity to the Autobiography, the publication of her experimental texts by the Modern Library and Random House has been largely overlooked. This article is organized around two central claims. First, it shows that unlike Alfred Harcourt, Cerf adopted a long-term strategy by publishing Stein's difficult writings, as well as her more accessible texts. Second, from 1934, Cerf used new media to position Stein as an atypical literary star. After the publication of Three Lives, he organized her tour in America and promoted her using his knowledge of the Hollywood entertainment industry. Blurring the boundaries between print and broadcasting, Cerf created a unique strategy for marketing Stein, a strategy that enabled her to stand out in a crowded literary marketplace.
History
School
- The Arts, English and Drama
Department
- English and Drama
Published in
Journal of Modern LiteratureVolume
39Issue
1Pages
149 - 169Citation
JAILLANT, L., 2015. Shucks, we've got glamour girls too! Gertrude Stein, Bennett Cerf and the culture of celebrity. Journal of Modern Literature, 39(1), pp. 149-169.Publisher
© Trustees of Indiana UniversityVersion
- AM (Accepted Manuscript)
Publisher statement
This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/Publication date
2015Notes
This paper was accepted for publication in the journal Journal of Modern Literature and the definitive published version is available at http://dx.doi.org/10.2979/jmodelite.39.1.149ISSN
0022-281XeISSN
1529-1464Publisher version
Language
- en