During the mid-point of her career, Stein had also become interested in saints and landscapes, a preoccupation that not only resulted in her fanciful novel Lucy Church Amiably, which Stein and Toklas published as the first title in their Plain Edition in 1930, but also in her first opera libretto, Four Saints in Three Acts (pub. 1934), for which the American gay composer Virgil Thomson composed the music.

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A modernist version of a long-standing gay and lesbian interest in saints' lives, the opera recounts, in a whimsical and meditative fashion, the harmonious efforts of a group of male and female Spanish Carmelite mystics to achieve sainthood.

In her final work, Stein once again returned to opera. Her libretto for Thomson's The Mother of Us All (1947), is her most explicitly feminist work, a moving paean to the American suffragist Susan B. Anthony. Alice Toklas appears thinly disguised as Anna Howard Shaw, Anthony's loyal compatriot, and Anthony often seems to speak for Stein herself.

Stein implicitly links her literary revolutions to Anthony's revolutionary political struggle to secure the vote for women and encourage people to live as individuals. Even as Anthony did not live to see her goals accomplished, so does Stein herself seem to realize that she may not live to see her revolution in letters brought to fruition.

In its evocative epilogue, The Mother of Us All enshrines Susan B. Anthony and Gertrude Stein as monuments to which the other women in the cast pay homage, "Not to what I won but to what was done."

Conclusion

When Stein died from cancer on July 27, 1946, the news made front-page headlines around the world. However, at the time her work was largely out of print and unread, and she was known principally as a personality. Only with the advent of the second wave of the women's movement, as well as the development of post-structuralist, feminist, and lesbian and gay literary criticism, has the full extent of Stein's importance as an innovator and transformer of the English language become apparent.

American lesbian literature prior to Stonewall exploited the "outlaw" status of the lesbian as it moved from encrypted strategies of expression to overt political celebrations of woman-for-woman passion.

It is impossible to understand twentieth-century lesbian literature without recognizing the significance of butch-femme relationships.

Governments, publishers, editors, and even gay writers themselves have censored gay content in literature from the Renaissance to the present.

Erotic and pornographic works have been written in many cultures since ancient times and recently have flourished with the relaxation of censorship.

Since the histories of gay men and lesbians are radically different, the challenge is to describe interrelations in the gay and lesbian literary heritages without blurring them into each other.

Despite the widespread homophobia in the Modernist movement, several of its practitioners were homosexual; some of them wrote openly about homosexuality, and the groundwork was laid for the gay liberation movement.

From the great modernist writers of the 1920s and 1930s to the pulp writers of the 1950s to the lesbian writers of today, lesbian novelists have had a powerful impact on the lesbian community.

Opera, an eclectic synthesis of voice, drama, music, costume, visual arts and spectacle, has played an integral role in queer culture since its development in seventeenth century Venice.

Patronage--the sponsorship of artists and the commissioning of works from them--has remained a significant factor in the creation of queer visual culture in the modern era.

Since the 1960s, the general trend in lesbian poetry has been collective and political rather than purely aesthetic.

Until the beginning of the twentieth century, intimate, exclusive, and often erotic romantic friendships between women were largely perceived as normal and socially acceptable.

From ancient times, homoerotic writing has been a notable part of the literature of war.

Although best known for her crusade for women's suffrage, Susan B. Anthony spoke out on a range of feminist issues.

Although Eliot tried to suppress the fact, The Waste Land is an elegy for a young Frenchman whom he met and loved in Paris and who died in the Great War in 1915.

Members of New York's early twentieth-century avant-garde, Charles Henri Ford and Parker Tyler are also the authors of a widely suppressed and largely unread experimental novel of 1930s gay life, The Young and Evil.

Though she was an accomplished and respected photojournalist, Gisèle Freund is today best remembered as a chronicler of the vibrant bohemian community of artists and writers that made its home in Paris during the 1930s.

Ernest Hemingway, himself sexually insecure, included negative, even abusive portrayals of gay men in his fiction.

American publisher and writer Robert McAlmon made significant contributions to twentieth-century literature, both by publishing avant-garde writers and by depicting a queer subculture in his own works.

Poet, translator, literary and art critic, and short story writer, Edouard Roditi was associated with most of the twentieth-century's avant-garde literary movements from Surrealism to post-modernism.

American artists and lifelong partners Maud Hunt Squire and Ethel Mars forged distinguished careers in book illustration, painting, and woodblock printing.

Critic and composer Virgil Thomson was a pioneer in creating a specifically American form of classical music that is at once "serious" yet whimsically sardonic.

The gay novelist, critic, and photographer Carl Van Vechten was especially interested in African-American culture and was an influential patron to many writers of the Harlem Renaissance.

The works of Thornton Wilder are landmarks of American literature, but they reveal scant traces of the author's homosexuality.