Happy Birthday, Gertrude Stein!

In honor of Gertrude Stein’s arrival on the planet, we share one of the first letters she wrote to her life-long friend, Thornton Wilder.

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To Thornton Wilder, Chicago, Illinois

[postmark: 8 December 1934)

Wilder and Stein photographed on 15-16 August, 1937 by William or Mildred Rogers

The Lowry
Fourth & Wabasha Streets
St. Paul, Minn[esota].

My dear Wilder,

Here we are and I do want to tell you how charmingly you made our stay in Chicago completely delightful. Everything you did added so much to everything, and I am enormously looking forward to our always knowing each other, we had a nice time in Madison, the students were very nice and one of the professors particularly so he has to do with the history of languages, then we had a marvellous flight in a tiny plane low over the snowed prairie, I am still all filled up with the xtraordinary symmetry of it, as a whole and in detail, well anyway I am awfully happy that we did get to be friends, Alice is writing to [Robert] Hutchins to give him our addresses, because there was not a moment before and once more and always

  Gtrde Stein.

The Letters of Gertrude Stein & Thornton Wilder, edited by Edward M. Burns and Ulla E. Dydo with William Rice, Yale University Press, p. 3.