Although remembered mostly for her audacious bestseller, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Gertrude Stein was a unique literary artist of the twentieth century who left a voluminous body of work, including novels, essays, poetry, and prose. Stymied--just once--by a case of writer's block, Stein forayed into the world of mystery fiction to rediscover her path to creativity. Combining elements of free association and interior monologue that earned her reputation as an avant-garde stylist, Stein drew from a summer's worth of mysterious events at her French country home for inspiration. Blood on the Dining-Room Floor is the brilliant result. A possible murder disrupts the peaceful setting when, in a nearby village, Madame Pernollet is found on the cement courtyard of her husband's hotel. Did she fall from a window above . . . or was she pushed? Was there someone who wanted the preoccupied woman out of the way? In a departure from the typical whodunit, with nary a detective to lead the way, Stein lays out a series of crimes and clues, enticing readers to come up with their own verdict on the baffling events of one unnatural summer.

Gertrude Stein began the creative work that was to earn her the reputation as one of the most original writers of this century with the three pieces in this volume. Fernhurst, a fictional episode based on a Bryn Mawr scandal of the early 1900s, explores the labyrinth of love between man and woman and between woman and woman; Q.E.D. fictionalizes an early Stein romance (doomed finally by a rival); and the third selection is an early draft of The Making of Americans, which records Stein's struggle toward maturity as woman and artist. Essential works of a significant twentieth-century literary voice.