Was Gertrude Stein the Twentieth-Century’s Henry James?

This article considers how Henry James and Gertrude Stein were connected between 1916 and 1947, the years of their respective deaths. When Stein became a household name in the U.S. soon after the publication of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933), she used her celebrity to defend James’s honor. Despite occasional attention to the intimate and professional ties Stein shared with the Jameses dating back to the 1890s, several literary and biographical influences remain unexamined. Of particular interest in this survey are the ways Henry James’s “Four Meetings” (1909) informed Stein’s avant-garde opera, Four Saints and Three Acts (1934).