Unlikely Collaboration: Gertrude Stein, Bernard Fay, and the Vichy Dilemma

Barbara Will is professor of English at Dartmouth College and the author of Gertrude Stein, Modernism, and the Problem of "Genius." She has written extensively on modernist literature and culture and is a specialist on the work of Gertrude Stein.

Barbara Will's Unlikely Collaboration is a beautifully written and engaging work that illuminates the lives and works of Gertrude Stein and Bernard Fay, their friendship, and the fascinating and troubled times in which that friendship formed and flourished. Will's book, penetrating in its psychological, literary, and historical insights, will appeal especially to readers interested in literary modernism and its often disturbing political connections. -- Richard J. Golsan, author of French Writers and the Politics of Complicity: Crises of Democracy in the 1940s and 1990s An unlikely collaboration indeed. One was perhaps America's most celebrated avant-garde writer, living in France; the other a French biographer of Benjamin Franklin turned anti-Masonic zealot and collaborator with the Nazis from 1940 to 1944. Gertrude Stein wanted to persuade Americans that the Vichy collaborationist leader Philippe Petain was a French George Washington; Bernard Fay helped save Stein's art collection, and maybe Stein herself, from the Nazis. Barbara Will brings alive their association and ponders the compatibility of literary modernism with political reaction. -- Robert O. Paxton, author of Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order, 1940--1944 Brilliant and fascinating... This exceptional study provides new insights into previously hidden corners of Stein's life. Publishers Weekly (starred review) 7/18/11 Barbara Will's story is well told... -- Phyllis Gaffney Irish Times 9/17/2011 A revealing and absorbing work of scholarship. -- Robert Fulford National Post 10/18/2011 ...revisited the relationship of Stein and Fay, offering the fullest account to date of their professional and personal ties. -- Eric Banks Chronicle Review 10/23/2011 [ Unlikely Collaboration] reveals a considerably more complex, and perhaps devious, Gertrude Stein than currently accepted legend would dictate. -- T.L. Ponick Washington Times 10/13/2011 A tenacious work of literary detection and analysis -- Jerome Boyd