Autobiography as Advertisement: Why Do Gertrude Stein's Sentences Get Under Our Skin?

Autobiographers can manipulate not only public issues in an indirect, suggestive way, but their autobiographies can have a similarly decisive role in modifying public opinion concerning the values of their own art. We fall pray to these seemingly innocent self-promoting strategies, even though they often influence decisively our assessment of these authors-and ultimately our literary canons. By examining the autobiography of Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas in light of a few accepted basics drawn from advertising, the present essay emphasizes the manipulative aspect of autobiographical writing by showing how the text of an autobiography can serve as a quite practical means to promote one's own art.