Gertrude Stein’s “Miss Furr and Miss Skeene” is set in 1910 America and Paris. Stein's subtle, experimental word portrait is the saga of two women’s lives, exploring their entry into the Bohemian world and the change between them as lovers and as devotees of life outside artistic and sexual convention.

In Tennessee Williams' short story "Two on a Party" a very unlikely couple takes a sexual road trip in this startling picture of the sexual mores of the 1950’s. When Cora meets Billy they are just a couple of hungry predators on a couple of New York bar stools. But soon, they find a bond in their ravenous lust for men. A heartbreaking tale of companionship, and certainly one the funniest and fun filled stories Williams ever set to paper, conveying all the heat, whimsy and aching desire of the Master’s great plays, The Glass Menagerie and A Streetcar Named Desire.

In the wake of Harvey Milk and liberation comes a story of responsibility and commitment, Armistead Maupin's "Suddenly Home" which tells the story of Tess, a woman doubting her romantic relationship. She looks for guidance from her brother and his boyfriend and sees in their relationship the true meaning of love. America’s master narrator of “the gay life” turns his pen to a tale of same-sex marriage. Laced with all his familiar wit, compassion and love of San Francisco, Maupin’s tale captures Baghdad by the Bay at a time of dramatic change, the late 1980’s. Maupin’s little family struggles to find answers to life’s confusing propositions.

ARMISTEAD MAUPIN (Tales of the City Series, The Night Listener) was one of the first of a new breed of openly gay authors; his appeal has always resided in his inclusiveness as a storyteller. For over thirty years his beloved characters from 28 Barbary Lane in the Tales of the City series have cut an unprecedented path through popular culture-from a groundbreaking newspaper serial to six internationally best-selling novels to a Peabody Award-winning miniseries starring Olympia Dukakis and Laura Linney. 

Maupin was born in Washington, D.C., in 1944 but grew up in Raleigh, North Carolina. A graduate of the University of North Carolina, he served as a naval officer in the Mediterranean and with the River Patrol Force in Vietnam.  Maupin worked briefly as a reporter for a newspaper in Charleston, South Carolina, before being assigned to the San Francisco bureau of the Associated Press in 1971. The climate of freedom and tolerance he found in his adopted city inspired him to come out publicly as homosexual in 1974. Two years later he launched his "Tales of the City" serial in the San Francisco Chronicle, the first fiction to appear in an American daily for decades. 

Maupin is the author of nine novels, including the six-volume Tales of the City series, Maybe the Moon, The Night Listener and, in 2007 he revisited one of his most beloved Tales characters in Michael Tolliver. Three miniseries starring Olympia Dukakis and Laura Linney were made from the first three novels in the Tales series. The Night Listener became a feature film starring Robin Williams and Toni Collette. Lives, a musical adaptation of Tales of the City is in the works from Jeff Whitty and Jason Moore (creators of the Tony award-winning hit Avenue Q), set to bow on Broadway in 2009. He is currently working on his next novel, Mary Ann in Autumn. Maupin lives in San Francisco with his husband, Christopher Turner.

 THOMAS LANIER WILLIAMS (1911-1983) was born in Columbus, Mississippi. The second of three children, his family life was full of tension. His parents, a shoe salesman and minister's daughter, often engaged in violent arguments that frightened his sister Rose. Williams would care for Rose (who suffered from schizophrenia and who had a frontal lobotomy with the permission of their mother) throughout much of her adult life.

In 1927, Williams got his first taste of literary fame when he took third place in a national essay contest sponsored by The Smart Set magazine. In 1929, he was admitted to the University of Missouri, planning to become a playwright. But his degree was interrupted when his father forced him to withdraw from college and work at the International Shoe Company. He returned to university, and in 1937, he had two of his plays (Candles to the Sun and The Fugitive Kind) produced. In 1938, he graduated from the University of Iowa. After failing to find work in Chicago, he moved to New Orleans and changed his name from "Tom" to "Tennessee, the state of his father's birth. In 1939, the young playwright received a $1,000 Rockefeller Grant, and a year later, Battle of Angels was produced in Boston.
                                                                                   
In 1944, The Glass Menagerie had a very successful run in Chicago and a year later burst its way onto Broadway. Elia Kazan (who directed many of Williams' greatest successes) said of Tennessee: "Everything in his life is in his plays, and everything in his plays is in his life." The Glass Menagerie won the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award for best play of the season.

Williams followed this major critical success with several other Broadway hits including A Streetcar Named Desire, Summer and Smoke, The Rose Tattoo, and Camino Real. He received his first Pulitzer Prize in 1948 for A Streetcar Named Desire, and reached an even larger world-wide audience in 1950-51 when The Glass Menagerie and A Streetcar Named Desire were made into major motion pictures. Later plays also made into films include Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (for which he earned a second Pulitzer in 1955), Orpheus Descending, and Night of the Iguana.

In 1947, Tennessee Williams met and fell in love with Frank Merlo. Merlo, a second generation Sicilian American who had served in the U.S. Navy in World War II, was a steadying influence in Williams' chaotic life. But in 1961, Merlo died of lung cancer and the playwright went into a deep, ten-year depression. For much of this period, he battled addictions to prescription drugs and alcohol.

On February 24, 1983, Tennessee Williams died in New York at his residence at the Hotel Elysee. He is buried in St. Louis, Missouri. In addition to twenty-five full length plays, Williams produced dozens of short plays and screenplays, two novels, a novella, sixty short stories, over one-hundred poems and an autobiography.

GERTRUDE STEIN was born February 4, 1874 in Allegheny, PA, now Pittsburgh. She spent her early childhood in Europe until the family moved to Oakland in 1880. Her father owned one of San Francisco's cable car lines. Both of her parents died by the time she was in her late teens; for a short time she lived in San Francisco before moving East to attend Radcliffe. (After her father's death the cable car line was sold, providing the income that would sustain Gertrude and her siblings well into the 1930s).

Gertrude's studies at Radcliffe included psychology and pre-med. Though she entered Johns Hopkins to study medicine, in 1903 she sailed to Paris to join her brothers, Leo and Michael.  The Steins soon became prominent collectors of modern art including works of Picasso, Matisse and Braque. The Saturday salon at 27 rue de Fleurus was the place to be for young artists of the time. 
                                                                       
Here Gertrude began writing, influenced both by her study of psychology as well as the works of the artists she met. She published Three Lives in 1909, and though it is stylistically conventional, it contains elements of  what would become her signature style of repetition and word-play.  She met Alice Toklas, a San Francisco native, in 1907 and the two were partners to the end of Gertrude's life:  nearly 40 years.

At this time she was also working on The Making of Americans, a family saga loosely based on her own family. Completed in 1911, the 1000 page book did not find a publisher until more than 10 years later and then only 500 copies were printed. For the next 20 years, finding publishers for her works continued to be problematic due to her unconventional style. Nonetheless, young writers including Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and Thornton Wilder flocked to Stein and were greatly influenced by her.

In 1933 with the publication of The Autobiograpy of Alice B. Toklas, Gertrude Stein finally had a bestseller. The success of  The Autobiography brought Gertrude and Alice back to the United States in 1934  for their only return visit-a seven month tour. In 1935, they reached San Francisco, where Gertrude received the key to the city.  This tour prompted Random House to promise annual  publication of one Stein book, regardless of content. 
                                                           
As World War II loomed, Gertrude's friends encouraged her to send her manuscripts to Yale University where they became the foundation of the largest collection of Stein/Toklas memorabilia in the world. Gertrude and Alice remained in Nazi-occupied France during the war; Gertrude died in 1946 at the age of 72.  Alice lived nearly 20 years longer, continuing to foster Gertrude's legacy, including the publication of all of unpublished works with Yale University Press.