Word: steinfuls
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...publishers waited for authors. Cerf sought them out and flattered, charmed-and signed up-some of the biggest names in the literary world. Together with Partner Donald Klopfer, he turned Random House, which they founded in 1927, into a pantheon of stars: Eugene O'Neill, James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, William Faulkner, Sinclair Lewis, Isak Dinesen, Truman Capote, John O'Hara and W.H. Auden. Now, in this posthumous volume, Cerf tells what goes on behind the bookshelves. Using tapes of his interviews for Columbia's oral history program, along with his diaries and scrapbooks, his widow, Phyllis Cerf...
...supreme gossip, and he had the gossip's alert eye for tattletale details. D.H. Lawrence's wife Frieda was a sloppy housekeeper, he noted, and years later he remembered a dirty milk bottle lying on its side in the middle of the Lawrence parlor. Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas were so grubbily dumpy that, on a visit they paid to Random House, an elevator boy automatically deposited them on a floor below, thinking they were going to an employment agency for domestic servants...
During a visit to the University of Chicago in 1934, Gertrude Stein landed in a steamy after-dinner debate with Philosopher Mortimer Adler about the merits of teaching literature in translation. Stein was firmly against it, and Adler defended the proposition fiercely. Suddenly she rose from her chair, marched over to Adler, and rapped him on the head. Said Stein: "I can see that you are the kind of young man who is accustomed to winning arguments...
...schemes would scorch the ears Truman Capote. In the three decades spanned by the novel- from the late Depression to the mid-'50s- she salvages Elesina from failure and alcohol, marries her to Irving and the Stein fortune, and finally launches her toward a seat in the House of Representatives...
Auchincloss's true dramatic moments are in exchanges of dialogue that he expertly stages to define his characers. It is this quality of closet theater that makes his work consistently entertaining-even when his sphere of wealth and privilege may seem hopelessly remote to most readers. Irving Stein provides the best example of this in the current novel. Urged to remember his sons when bequeathing his entire art collection to Elesina, he relents with a few to kens: "Well, suppose I leave them each a painting?...To Lionel the Holbein of Mary Tudor. To Peter the Botticelli To David...