But the work—half a century in the past—can still evoke the same hush of admiration or provoke the same hoots of derision that it did in the 1930s.

The World Is Round is Gertrude Stein for everyone—child and adult—providing that one is willing to relax certain prejudices and ignore the absence of certain conventions. I do not mean to imply that Stein will come across for all with the ease of The Little Engine That Could. Like most good writing, The World Is Round does not instantly yield its full meaning. It will have the reader returning again and again to ask some of the same questions Rose herself asks, “Well shall I go,” and to find some of the same answers Rose does, “Anything can happen while you are going up a hill. And a mountain is so much harder than a hill and still. Go on.”

In its publicity for the first edition Young Scott Books advised its readers that should they have difficulty in following the text, they might read faster, and that if they still had difficulty, they should read faster still. Today no such advice seems necessary. The core of meaning in the round songs and rhyming prose is more comprehensible than it was when the book was first published. Perhaps the electronic age, the age of television and the computer, has enabled us to move along the lines of thought with a speed of cognition that can keep up with the swift pace of this expatriate genius.

During the years at Bilignin Gertrude Stein achieved her greatest commercial success, but it was accompanied by a degree of self-doubt. After her first best seller, she developed a writer’s block, and throughout the 1930s a question of identity plagued her. “I am I because my little dog knows me” was her persistent observation. World War II was looming in the future, and in 1938 France was panicked with fear of a German invasion. Gertrude adamantly refused to believe that war could possibly occur and repeatedly said it would not, as if saying could make it so. She was sixty-five years old and did not like to contemplate a change from the good life at Bilignin or a return to America. As loudly as she proclaimed the virtue of being American in her writings, when she returned to California in her lecture tour of 1934, she had not been happy. Alice was elated by revisiting the scenes of her childhood and youth, but Gertrude was depressed by childhood memories when she saw Oakland again, the city about which she had made the remark, “There is no there there.”

Above all Gertrude Stein wanted to be there, just as Rose does. Despite the obvious humor in the story—“It is not easy to give a lion away / What did you say”—and a sense of fun that pervades the style, the core of The World Is Round is very serious. Rose’s struggle to climb the mountain is everyone’s attempt to arrive at some place where one is finally there. Interpreted in the light of Gertrude Stein’s life, this book is curiously touching, heroic even. In Rose we may see a psychological self-portrait of Stein herself, as she approaches old age, troubled by hostile forces in Europe. Perhaps this accounts for the slightly menacing tone and the vague uneasiness that pervades The World Is Round. There is something ominous in the events of the story—near-drowning, bad dreams, climbing a mountain in darkness, and the whisper of the devil’s name. Rose is always afraid, but she comforts herself by singing; she soothes herself with the litany of the mountain: if she can just climb the mountain she will be there. And so she sings, and that always causes her to burst into tears. Rose always cries: “Just try / Not to make Rose cry / Just try.”

In Rose’s solitary struggle to climb the mountain, it is art that finally triumphs. When Rose in darkness does not want to take comfort in tears, when she will not sing because it would only make her cry, she dispels her fears by standing on the blue chair, and reaching as high as she can, she carves Gertrude Stein’s immortal line “Rose is a rose” around the trunk of a tree. But there is a happy ending after all the struggle. As in the fairy tales where the Prince is transformed, Rose’s cousin and counterpart, Willie, who has no uncertainty about himself, is conveniently discovered not to have been her cousin after all, and is therefore available as a husband to live with happily ever after. Skipping over the awkwardness of adolescence and mysteries of courtship, the young reader comes to the desired conclusion. Upon a lonely pinnacle where Rose is finally there, but bemoaning her fate, a searchlight illuminates her, leading her to happiness with another human being.

Despite the seriousness at the heart of The World Is Round, what captures new readers for it every year is its overwhelming sense of fun and playfulness of language. Nowhere has this been better expressed than in a review by Louise Seaman Bechtel, one of the most outstanding editors and reviewers of children’s books in the 1920s and ’30s. In The Horn Book Magazine, September 1939, Bechtel wrote: “Here is a new book that is a new kind of book, and I like it very much. It is rather a job to tell you why, because it has to be read aloud.