On 5 November 1946 Stein was cited by Lt. General Geoffrey Keyes for having organized and commanded the best occupational training schools in the Third Army Area in the American Zone of Germany.
While teaching, he took his master's degree in English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University in 1949 and was accepted for the famed doctoral seminar conducted jointly by Lionel Trilling and Jacques Barzun, both of whose writings Stein was later to edit.
Stein completed a second play, A Shadow of My Enemy, originally intended as an adaptation of Whittaker Chambers' best-selling memoir, Witness (1952), but, when denied rights, based on public record and published in 1957.
[5] The play, whose synopsis runs "A senior editor of Time magazine accuses his closest friend of being a Communist",[6] was originally commissioned by the Theater Guild and subsequently produced on Broadway by Roger Stevens, Alfred deLiagre Jr., and Hume Cronyn.
Stein's play A Shadow of My Enemy was produced in 1957 by Roger Stevens, Alfred deLiagre Jr. and Hume Cronyn at the National Theater in Washington and the ANTA theatre on Broadway in New York starring Ed Begley and Gene Raymond.
Working as a freelance contractor, Stein's first list for Beacon included Three Who Made a Revolution by Bertram Wolfe, Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell, The Century of Total War by Raymond Aron, An End to Innocence by Leslie Fiedler, The Need for Roots by Simone Weil, The Hero in History by Sidney Hook, Social Darwinism in American Thought by Richard Hofstadter, and The Invisible Writing by Arthur Koestler.
He was also responsible for the continued publication of Bertram D. Wolfe's The Fabulous Life of Diego Rivera and George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia, selected as #42 of the 100 best nonfiction books of the 20th century.
The New York Times said, "He has produced an appalling, Dickensian portrait of the entire system...ought to be read not only by executives facing Chapter 11 but by all entrepreneurs and indeed by anyone who fantasizes about running his own company.
Stein and Day was the originating publisher of works by Leslie Fiedler, David Frost, Jack Higgins, GordonThomas, Budd Schulberg, Claude Brown, Bertram Wolfe, Mary Cheever, Harry Lorayne, Barbara Howar, Elaine Morgan, Wanda Landowska, Marilyn Monroe, Oliver Lange, and F. Lee Bailey, among others.