You've written a strange little book, the head of the Grafton Press told Gertrude Stein, and most people won't take it very seriously. Frederick Hitcheock was referring to Three Lives.He suggested Stein write a preface---better yet, let someone else write it--to explain what the stories in Three Lives were about. Stein refused. And yet she never shrank from talking about her work, sometimes in terms that shocked readers as much as the work itself did. Three Lives, she proclaimed grandly, "was the first definite step away from the nineteenth century and into the twentieth in literature."

The first published work of fiction by legendary author and poet Gertrude Stein. THREE LIVES is a collection of two short stories and a novella focusing on the bleak existence that faced immigrant and minority women in turn-of-the-century America.

Each impoverished woman must labor as a domestic worker to survive, and all three protagonists have their own tales of hardship. "The Good Anna" tells the story of a young German servant who must decide between loyalty to her employer and love. In "The Gentle Lenna." another German servant girl marries the wrong man, and finds herself trapped as a wife and mother. And the introspective "Melanctha" examines the tragic life of a mulatto woman and those she loved.

INTRODUCTION

THREE LIVES

  The Good Anna

  Melanctha

  The Gentle Lena

APPENDIX:Q.E.D.

CRITICAL EXCERPTS

SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING