If one wishes to use it properly, the term avant-garde should meet three criteria when used to describe works of art. First and foremost it must defy artistic trends of the time, distancing itself as far as possible from established trends of the time. It also must take considerable time to find a significant audience. Lastly, it will most likely inspire future groundbreaking endeavors, by artists in whatever medium. Gertrude Stein's work as an author and poet satisfies all of these criteria. Her writings were unlike anything written in their time, and still to this day scholars debate their literary merit. The influence and inspiration that her writing lends to later authors gives Stein's work its most weight.
             The first task of sifting through Stein's work to find its purpose and value is indeed a difficult one. Her writing looks and sounds primitive, almost as if a child is trying to draw out of her mind some long-buried memory. But like in a child's pure words, it is in her own unsophisticated language that the reader finds the purpose and value of her works: the truth. Sherwood Anderson, a contemporary of Ms. Stein articulated the ultimate accomplishment of her work. "I think that these books of Gertrude Stein do in a very real sense is recreate life in words." This aspect of her writing is the most obvious and prevalent common-thread in the work of all Ms. Stein's contemporaries.
             The pupils of Ms. Stein lived in a frighteningly precarious time. The first World War had only recently ceased, the excesses of the Prohibition-era began appearing across the United States, and young men could not reconcile the values with which they had been raised, and the world outside their childhood homes that blatantly contradicted them. It was in such a climate that aspiring writers in search of truth began reading Ms. Stein's works. Her words provided them with the truth; nothing morally concrete, bu...