On July 27, 1945 an American G.I. named Mark Hasselriis wrote a letter to his family describing his day's adventure with the American writer Gertrude Stein. Clearly impressed by the companionship, Hasselriis reports in detail the circumstances that brought Stein to Germany with his company. But the highlight of the day would be a rather surreal find at the recently abandoned setting of Hitler's home on the Obersalzburg. "She and the Gertrude Stein party went all over the place [. . . ] and she even picked up a photo of a broken forearm while she was at Berktisgaden (sp?) which I said might be the arm Hitler broke in the attempt on his life. You will no doubt read about that soon, so keep your eyes glued to "time" magazine for a while." He concludes the letter, "She did not want to see any horrors (i.e., Belsen) who can blame her..."

Stein's article was indeed published, on August 6, 1945 in Life-not Time-under the title "Off We All Went to See Germany." However, in the final version of the story the x-ray that she souvenired is credited to G.I.'s while Stein considers "liberating" a radiator for her terrace. But if you go to the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library you will find this letter as well as the original manuscript of Stein's article which reveals, for one, that she did a lot more at The Fuhrer's Eagle's nest than see. Suspecting this, I went off this summer to look at the

extensive holdings at Yale's famous library and after three ten-hour days digging through its trove, I went to Columbia University's more modest, but equally rewarding, Random House collection. Mine was an enormously rewarding research adventure funded generously by a travel grant from Center for Feminist Research.

With the first three boxes of manuscripts and correspondence, I knew that my visit would be fruitful. Stein's sprawling and loopy cursive fills an infinite number of small French school cahiers with covers featuring downhill skiers and French colonial conquests. Arbitrarily abbreviating and willfully disregarding lines, Stein spent the darkest hours of night dashing off script as large as her ideas. The next morning Alice dutifully typed up the poems, operas, and maxims into proper manuscript format and sent them back to Gertrude for corrections. As scholars, we want to see the originals, to hold the notebooks in our hands, and scrutinize every postcard and receipt tucked into them. Such ephemera become pivots to a past we strive to understand. But Stein does not make this easy on us, for even though she obediently sent her archives off to the Beinecke Library, she was not concerned that her handwriting would be tolerable for future scholars of her work. But with several consultations from gracious librarians, I was able to decipher her manuscripts and feel the rewards for doing so.

The Stein Archive allows for a different Stein than I have ever known in poetry or prose, biographies or critical treatment. Like Virginia Woolf, Stein is an icon of women's studies and often scholarly work casts her poetic experimentation in anti-authoritarian terms. But what happens when we allow Stein's radical use of language to obscure our view of her conservative opinions? Or receive her "anti-authoritarian" poetic form as political commentary? What emerges in correspondence, small overlooked reviews, lesser read pieces, and marginalia is another Stein, one fascinated by the nature of power as embodied in such figures as Ulysses S. Grant, George Washington, Marechal Petain, and Adolph Hitler. In works such as Four in America, Mrs. Reynolds, and the infamous "Introduction to the Speeches of Marechal Petain," Stein examines the nature of authority and authoritarianism at times typologically aligning herself with these heroes and anti-heroes of history. Stein creates new myths and explodes old ones, personalizes and fetishizes villains, and re-invents the foundations of their fame. My trip to the Beinecke was the beginning of my effort to understand how Stein's own struggles to have an audience, to manage her celebrity status, to author and be authoritative were often negotiated through ironic, self-reflexive, and provocative explorations of male leaders.

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