Geography and Plays is a collection of Gertrude Stein’s writing from about 1908 to 1920. Originally published in 1922 with an introduction by Sherwood Anderson, it was almost inaccessible for many years. This edition makes it possible for students and other devotees of Stein to see the developing strategies of one of the acknowledged giants of literary modernism, whose pathbreaking departures in literary style have recently been assigned still greater importance in light of new theories about women’s writing. An introduction by Cyrena N. Pondrom provides contemporary readers with a fine orientation to the importance of Stein’s achievement in this early work.

Gertrude Stein (1874–1946) is also the author of Three Lives, Tender Buttons, The Making of Americans, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, and dozens of other novels, plays, poems, and stories. Cyrena N. Pondrom is professor of English and director of the Women’s Studies Research Center at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.