“Nouns are pretty dead and adjectives which are related to nouns which are practically dead are even more dead.”

The letters which follow were written by Gertrude Stein to an obscure, struggling writer named Wendell Wilcox. He had seen Stein’s work in 1926 while he was an undergraduate at the University of Chicago. He read a borrowed copy of her book Tender Buttons. Fifteen years later he wrote to her: