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How I Read Gertrude Stein
Book by Welch, Lew
130 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1995
4 people are currently reading
49 people want to read
About the author
Lew Welch
38 books18 followersLewis Barrett Welch, Jr. is an American poet associated with the Beat generation of poets, artists, and iconoclasts.
According to Aram Saroyan who wrote Genesis Angels: The Saga of Lew Welch and the Beat Generation, Welch decided to become a writer after reading Gertrude Stein's long story "Melanctha." Welch published and performed widely during the 1960s, and taught a poetry workshop as part of the University of California Extension in San Francisco from 1965 to 1970.
On May 23, 1971, he walked out of poet Gary Snyder's house in the mountains of California, carrying his 30-30 rifle and leaving behind a suicide note. His body was never found.
According to Aram Saroyan who wrote Genesis Angels: The Saga of Lew Welch and the Beat Generation, Welch decided to become a writer after reading Gertrude Stein's long story "Melanctha." Welch published and performed widely during the 1960s, and taught a poetry workshop as part of the University of California Extension in San Francisco from 1965 to 1970.
On May 23, 1971, he walked out of poet Gary Snyder's house in the mountains of California, carrying his 30-30 rifle and leaving behind a suicide note. His body was never found.
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
January 29, 2026
Reading Lew Welch's How I Read Gertrude Stein, which is essentially Welch's BA thesis in condensed form, makes me want to go back and read Stein again.
I have fond memories of reading The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas back around 2018, when my daughter was still a baby. I loved it and didn't know what all the negative fuss was about Gertrude Stein. Then I tried Tender Buttons, and although it is definitely unusual, I just felt that Stein was playing with language like a toy, twisting and turning words this way and that way to see how they sounded. After that, I remember picking up a copy of Three Lives, definitely her most well-known work. Once again, I was overall impressed. So far, a hat trick. Then, I decided to try reading through The Making of Americans. My university library happened to have a copy of the rare unexpurgated original from 1925. I started off quite liking it but by the end, I wanted to throw the book down ten flights, stomp on it, and set fire to it. That's how frustrating it was. Finally, in that moment, I understood the gripes about Stein.
However, as Welch points out here, Stein has quite a few different styles. Although the style she adopts in The Making of Americans is based on repetition and an increasingly complex sequence of permutations on sentence forms (which may seem either "beautiful" or "monumental" in Welch's eyes or perhaps "tedious" to other readers, depending on your point of view), like any great artist, she always moved on and tried something different.
If a reader fresh and new to Stein picks up a copy of The Making of Americans and summarily flings down the book quite quickly with a dismissive 'nope, not for me' and never tries Stein again, personally, I wouldn't blame him/her. However, she does have some really delightful texts and books like Geography and Plays, which will sound absurdist if you read it from the perspective of 'meaning,' but it is also quite hilarious. Geography and Plays reads almost like another language and what I liked about it was the variation of topics and themes, which makes it far more enjoyable than the tediousness and endless permutations in The Making of Americans.
However, these are more my thoughts on Stein, rather than Welch's own. Welch explains her much better than I am doing right now. In fact, he does an impressive job, so impressive that it even caught the attention of William Carlos Williams, another fan and admirer of Stein's work. Williams wanted Welch's thesis to be published and I'm very glad that it was.
If you are new to Stein, in fact, please read Welch's short thesis (only about 90 pages) first. It will give you some good background and knowledge of what you will encounter when you open any of her famous books. Of course, Welch did not have access to many of her other texts, which were still unpublished at the time. I wonder what he would have written about them.
Welch's writing is very clear, concise and compelling. It has convinced me that Stein IS indeed worth reading with patience and with a great attention to the rhythms of her cadences, and LESS focus on the actual meaning of what is being said.
I have fond memories of reading The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas back around 2018, when my daughter was still a baby. I loved it and didn't know what all the negative fuss was about Gertrude Stein. Then I tried Tender Buttons, and although it is definitely unusual, I just felt that Stein was playing with language like a toy, twisting and turning words this way and that way to see how they sounded. After that, I remember picking up a copy of Three Lives, definitely her most well-known work. Once again, I was overall impressed. So far, a hat trick. Then, I decided to try reading through The Making of Americans. My university library happened to have a copy of the rare unexpurgated original from 1925. I started off quite liking it but by the end, I wanted to throw the book down ten flights, stomp on it, and set fire to it. That's how frustrating it was. Finally, in that moment, I understood the gripes about Stein.
However, as Welch points out here, Stein has quite a few different styles. Although the style she adopts in The Making of Americans is based on repetition and an increasingly complex sequence of permutations on sentence forms (which may seem either "beautiful" or "monumental" in Welch's eyes or perhaps "tedious" to other readers, depending on your point of view), like any great artist, she always moved on and tried something different.
If a reader fresh and new to Stein picks up a copy of The Making of Americans and summarily flings down the book quite quickly with a dismissive 'nope, not for me' and never tries Stein again, personally, I wouldn't blame him/her. However, she does have some really delightful texts and books like Geography and Plays, which will sound absurdist if you read it from the perspective of 'meaning,' but it is also quite hilarious. Geography and Plays reads almost like another language and what I liked about it was the variation of topics and themes, which makes it far more enjoyable than the tediousness and endless permutations in The Making of Americans.
However, these are more my thoughts on Stein, rather than Welch's own. Welch explains her much better than I am doing right now. In fact, he does an impressive job, so impressive that it even caught the attention of William Carlos Williams, another fan and admirer of Stein's work. Williams wanted Welch's thesis to be published and I'm very glad that it was.
If you are new to Stein, in fact, please read Welch's short thesis (only about 90 pages) first. It will give you some good background and knowledge of what you will encounter when you open any of her famous books. Of course, Welch did not have access to many of her other texts, which were still unpublished at the time. I wonder what he would have written about them.
Welch's writing is very clear, concise and compelling. It has convinced me that Stein IS indeed worth reading with patience and with a great attention to the rhythms of her cadences, and LESS focus on the actual meaning of what is being said.
March 18, 2025
The first time I read "The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas," I got caught up in the author's own joy in her own writing, in her own being. That pleasure -- both hers and mine -- ended up extending to her other writing too: her plays, her essays, her novels, her other memoirs. Over the years, Stein has truly provided me with a lifetime of enjoyment! And so, poet Lew Welch's enthusiastic and intelligent analysis of Stein's writing -- specifically, her output from 1904-1912 (more specifically, "Three Lives," "The Making of Americans," "How to Write" and "Tender Buttons") -- is very much to my liking. For what Stein does, as Welch deftly points out, is write in a way that sometimes invites you into process and sometimes invites you into consciousness. Having read too many critiques that simply didn't get the brilliance of "The Making of Americans," that insisted on trivializing her use of repetition, that attacked her character because "how dare she," Welch's unabashed adoration of Stein's mind and her accomplishments is nothing short of refreshing. That he wrote this book as an undergraduate thesis paper just goes to show how insight can come at any age.
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