In 1934 Gertrude Stein returned to the United States, for the first time in thirty years, to give her Lectures in America. Approaching the delivery of her lectures within their historical context, mediating communicative shifts from the nineteenth-century novel to twentieth-century publicity, and accounting for distinctions between speaking and writing, Stein used public relations strategies to capitalize on her celebrity and to introduce audiences to her modernist compositional processes. The lecture tour became an occasion for engaging the public relations culture that dictated the terms of her image's circulation and for retheorizing delivery in an age of publicity.

This article elucidates Gertrude Stein's theory of rhetorical grammar by locating it in her studies at Harvard University/Radcliffe College in the mid-1890s and by demonstrating how for Stein the study of grammar correlates with rhetoric's first canon, invention. In her experimental primer, How to Write (1931), a book about the craft of composition, Stein devotes chapters to vocabulary, sentences, paragraphs, grammar, and forensics, but refuses to reduce writing to mechanical correctness. For Stein, a grammar that supposes invention as both discovering and creating does something much more than offer pre-existing rules for writers to follow. Placing Gertrude Stein's writing practices in the rhetorical traditions of the nineteenth century reveals a Gertrude Stein who is not necessarily or not only a literary figure, but rather a twentieth-century rhetorician who refigures past traditions to teach a new century how to write.