Gertrude Stein: Mother of all avant-gardists

'Gertrude Stein is the consummate avant-gardist. She is always ahead of the pack, even a rarefied pack. No less a poet than John Ashbery has confessed to several attempts at reading her "endless impossible novel, 'The Making of Americans,' " and years of pretending to have read it. Finally he did, and swears he would do so again: it is, he said, "one of the monuments of our literature and of world literature." I haven't managed it yet. Monuments can be appreciated from a distance, too.' Interesting take on Gertude a Stein is a Stein is a Stein.