In A Moveable Feast (1964), Ernest Hemingway, a friend and fellow novelist of Gertrude Stein, depicts the Parisian environment they both inhabited. His depiction of Stein has shaped the perspective of multiple generations of critics.

Stein offered a glimpse into her life in Paris with her 1933 bestseller, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. Despite its title, the book primarily centers on Stein, purportedly as seen through the perspective of her companion.

Novelist James Joyce cemented his reputation as a prominent twentieth-century writer with A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916). This narrative, which follows a boy's journey from childhood to young adulthood, was revolutionary in style, similar to "Melanctha."

The titular character in Sula (1973), a novel by Nobel Prize laureate Toni Morrison, is an African American woman who, like Melanctha, "wanders" through life, questions the morality of those around her, and shares a profound emotional connection with a female friend.

A hallmark of literary modernism, Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1927) explores the domestic life of the Ramsey family, a middle-class English household. Woolf's innovative approach to form, akin to Stein's, highlights the processes of perception and the complexities of interpersonal communication.

Jean Toomer’s Cane (1923), an acclaimed work of the Harlem Renaissance, is a collection of short stories and prose poems portraying African-American life in the rural South. Although Toomer's racial identity remains ambiguous, he reportedly identified as African American during his time in the South, where he observed the lives of its residents.

William James, a psychology professor and Stein’s mentor at Radcliffe, authored numerous books on his theories. One introductory text, released in 1961 by Harper and Row, is Psychology: The Briefer Course.