Newly famous in the wake of the publication of her groundbreaking "Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas," Gertrude Stein delivered her "Narration" lectures to packed audiences at the University of Chicago in 1935. Stein had not been back to her home country since departing for France in 1903, and her remarks reflect on the changes in American culture after thirty years abroad.

In Stein s trademark experimental prose, "Narration "reveals the legendary writer s thoughts about the energy and mobility of the American people, the effect of modernism on literary form, the nature of history and its...