In Three Lives are the stories of three working-class women from Bridgepoint, a town loosely based on Baltimore, in the early twentieth century. Each story tells of the hopes, loves, romances and sadnesses of the women as they live their lives.
Written in an unconventional style, the lives of the three women are uncovered through their layered conversations and interactions more than through detailed depictions. The book is notable for its descriptions of homosexual romance, something that at the time in the USA wasn't accepted (indeed, Gertrude Stein moved with her partner to Paris to be able to live openly).
Three Lives was Gertrude Stein's first published book, and although the sales weren't as expected it was generally well received by critics. It's considered today to be among her more accessible books, and is a regular on English literature curricula.
A landmark of literary modernism from one of the twentieth century's most influential writers, this edition brings Stein's groundbreaking early style to a new generation of readers, ideal for students and anyone interested in the roots of experimental American fiction.
The source for this public-domain ebook is Standard Ebooks (standardebooks.org). Ebooks from other sources often have typos, inconsistent spelling, missing accent marks, and missing punctuation. Ebooks from Standard Ebooks are proofread line by line against a scan of the original printed pages, then proofread again from cover to cover. They are also formatted and typeset following a professional-grade style manual, resulting in new editions supporting state-of-the-art ereader technology: automatic hyphenation, popup footnotes, complete and consistent metadata, high-resolution and scalable vector graphics, and ereader-compatible tables of contents. All of this makes the finished ebooks accurate, functional, and beautiful, a pleasure to read. (Waking Lion Press is not affiliated with or endorsed by Standard Ebooks.)