LAST OPERAS AND PLAYS; By Gertrude Stein / Edited and with an Introduction by Carl Van Vechten by Stein, Gertrude - 1949

New York Toronto: Rinehart & Company, Inc, 1949. First Edition. Cloth. Near Fine/Near Fine. 8vo, orange cloth with black label & gold lettering on spine, frontispiece B&W glossy photo of Gertrude Stein, Mylar-protected white & black lettered dj on a red background (price-clipped), xix, [xx: blank] + 480 pages. Gertrude Stein (Oakland, CA: 1874 - 1946) was an American novelist, poet, playwright, and art collector. Stein moved to Paris in 1903, and made France her home for the remainder of her life. She hosted a Paris salon, where the leading figures of modernism in literature and art, such as Pablo Picasso, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sinclair Lewis, Ezra Pound, Sherwood Anderson and Henri Matisse, would meet. In 1933, Stein published a quasi-memoir of her Paris years, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, written in the voice of her life partner Alice B. Toklas, an American-born member of the Parisian avant-garde. The book became a literary bestseller and vaulted Stein from the relative obscurity of the cult-literature scene into the limelight of mainstream attention. Two quotes from her works have become widely known: "Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose" and "there is no there there." Her books include Q.E.D. (Quod Erat Demonstrandum) (1903), about a lesbian romantic affair involving several of Stein's female friends, Fernhurst, a fictional story about another romantic affair; Three Lives (1905-06), and The Making of Americans (1902-1911). In Tender Buttons (1914), Stein commented on lesbian sexuality. LAST OPERAS AND PLAYS was approximately the 19th book of Stein's literary work, and it was followed by publication of around three more posthumously published works and a few collections of her letters. SUPERIOR COPY of this posthumous collection of Gertrude Stein's unpublished works--copyrighted in 1949 by Stein's lover, Alice B. Toklas--and edited by her longtime friend, Carl Van Vechten. Slight rubbing to extremities of an otherwise highly attractive dust jacket, which reproduced on its rear panel the book's frontispiece taken by Van Vechten. Previous owner's name barely noticeable on the upper-inner corner of the rear pastedown. There are a few scattered very light pencil--easily eraseable--and seemingly learned editorial corrections in the book (most are in "Four Saints in Three Acts" located at the end of the book). We have left them untouched in case they have some special but as yet unidentified editorial significance.