Editing Gertrude Stein (section)

===America (1934–1935)===
In October 1934, Stein arrived in America after a 30-year absence. Disembarking from the ocean liner in New York, she encountered a throng of reporters. Front-page articles on Stein appeared in almost every New York City newspaper. As she rode through Manhattan to her hotel, she was able to get a sense of the publicity that would hallmark her US tour. An electric sign in [[Times Square]] announced to all that "Gertrude Stein Has Arrived."<ref name="autogenerated3">{{cite web |url=https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/when-gertrude-stein-toured-america-105320781/ |title=When Gertrude Stein Toured America |date=October 14, 2011 |access-date=October 21, 2012}}</ref> Her six-month tour of the country encompassed 191 days of travel, criss-crossing 23 states and visiting 37 cities. Among other sites, Stein visited Civil War battlefields, toured Chicago with homicide detectives, saw a football game in New Haven, dined in New Orleans, visited Scott Fitzergald and Zelda Sayre in Baltimore, and returned to her childhood home in Oakland.<ref>{{cite book |last1=Morris |first1=Roy |title=Gertrude Stein Has Arrived The Homecoming of a Literary Legend |date=2019 |publisher=Johns Hopkins University Press |location=Baltimore |pages=6–7}}</ref>

Stein's tour was partly to give public lectures, and she prepared each individually; the audiences were limited to five hundred attendees. She spoke, reading from notes, and provided for an audience question and answer period at the end of her presentation.<ref name="autogenerated3"/>

Stein's effectiveness as a lecture speaker received varying evaluations. At the time, some maintained that "Stein's audiences by and large did not understand her lectures." Some of those in the psychiatric community weighed in, judging that Stein suffered from a [[speech disorder]], [[palilalia]], which caused her "to stutter over words and phrases". The predominant feeling, however, was that Stein was a compelling presence, a fascinating personality who could hold listeners with the "musicality of her language".<ref name="autogenerated3"/>

In Washington, D.C. Stein was invited to have tea with the President's wife, [[Eleanor Roosevelt]]. In [[Beverly Hills]], California, she visited actor and filmmaker [[Charlie Chaplin]], who reportedly discussed the future of cinema with her.<ref name="autogenerated3"/> Stein left America in May 1935, a newly minted American celebrity with a commitment from [[Random House]], who had agreed to become the American publisher for all of her future works.<ref name="autogenerated3"/><ref>[[#Jaillant|Jaillant (2015)]]</ref> The ''[[Chicago Daily Tribune]]'' wrote after Stein's return to Paris: "No writer in years has been so widely discussed, so much caricatured, so passionately championed."<ref name="autogenerated3"/>