Gertrude Stein often called herself a genius, but what did this term really mean to her? This book examines the centrality and the specificity of the idea of "genius" to Stein's work and to the aesthetic ideals and contradictory intellectual affiliations of high modernism in general. Through a chronological reading, it maps Stein's move from an early investment in an essential notion of "genius" to her later use of the term to describe an anti-essentialist, democratic process. Drawing upon a wide range of literary theory, cultural criticism and historical evidence, and offering new readings of previously unexamined texts by Stein, Barbara Will challenges received understandings of Stein's claims to "genius" and of modernist literary hermeticism by reconceptualizing the textual practice of this exemplary modernist writer.