As much as Henry James before her, albeit in the glare of bohemian rupture rather than the fantasmatic glow of a renewed relationship to unbroken tradition, Gertrude Stein became the archetypal American expatriate artist for her generation, inextricably linking cultural authority to the continent once again. And as much as James if not more, she was to stress in various ways the essentially American aspect of her situation, in a body of writing consistently concerned with siting and situating generally. If her influence was decisive for Sherwood Anderson and Ernest Hemingway, two writers more obviously concerned with representing or perhaps embodying a certain “Americanness,” it is by no means coincidental nor reducible to an abstraction called “style.” Nor is it an accident that Wyndham Lewis places her at the center of a worried discussion of American literature and the American vernacular, which orients his analysis of Hemingway in his Men Without Art of 1934. The expatriate Stein becomes for Lewis a flashpoint of the dangers he sees pertaining to the propagation of American literature as vector of American speech—an idiom which threatens to blur the distinctions on which, for Lewis, subjective identity, social order, and high art all rely. If Lewis' pseudo-Nietzschean, authoritarian, and anti-Semitic account is a travesty of Stein, it is nevertheless one which is far from irrelevant, as the issues and problems Lewis pinpoints are ones that exercised Stein in the 1930s also: geography and identity, influence and originality, speech and writing, repetition and inauguration.