Perhaps the oddest and most influential collaboration in the history of American modernism was hatched in 1926, when a young Virgil Thomson knocked on Gertrude Stein's door in Paris. Eight years later, their opera Four Saints in Three Acts became a sensation--the longest-running opera in Broadway history to date and the most widely reported cultural event of its time. Prepare for Saints is Steven Watson's brilliant and absorbing account of how that revolutionary opera was born.

Steven Watson is a cultural historian of the American avant-garde. He is the author of Harlem Renaissance (1995), The Birth of the Beat Generation (1995), and Strange Bedfellows: The First American Avant-Garde (1991).

"The story of how Four Saints came to the stage is full of racy drama, and Steven Watson tells it engagingly. This is a terrific book."—Jim Holt, New York Times Book Review

"Steven Watson's rousing chronicle of the making of the 1934 Virgil Thomson/Gertrude Stein opera, Four Saints in Three Acts, is a 42nd street for the American avant-garde. . . . Four Saints is a witty pairing of Stein's sensuous, free-form wordplay and Thomson's blend of art song, Protestant hymns, and 'Skip to My Lou' folksiness. All of its components work together to make the opera the rare thing that it is: a sweetly comic, genuinely sophisticated, uniquely American celebration of artmaking. Sparked by Stein's plainspoken, down-home diction, Thomson's playful snatches of Americana were perfectly interpreted by the black cast, who helped pull off this backroads Baptist rendition of sixteenth-century hagiography. After Four Saints' premiere, art dealers and bon vivants Julien Levy and Kirk Askew were both reduced to tears, saying that 'they didn't know anything so beautiful could be done in America.'"—Michael Duncan, Artforum

"Mr. Watson does an engaging job of conjuring up the overlapping worlds his subjects inhabited: the feud-ridden expatriate community in Paris where Thomson and Stein met in the 1920's and the trend-setting bohemia of 1930's New York, where Thomson would find the patrons and promoters who would get Four Saints produced."—Michiko Kakutani, New York Times

"Watson tells this quintessential American tale with humor, deft plotting and a keen eye for character. Particularly in the book's final third, when the opera becomes Broadway-bound, Prepare for Saints is difficult to put down."—Dan Blue, San Francisco Chronicle

"This heroic, pathbreaking generation vitally shaped the tastes of this century. Steven Watson has set America's modernists down in these pages with vivid accuracy."—Philip Johnson