Gertrude Stein

1874-1946 , Allegheny , PA

Gertrude Stein was born in Allegheny, Pennsylvania, on

February 3, 1874, to wealthy German-Jewish immigrants. At
the age of three, her family moved first to Vienna and then to
Paris. They returned to America in 1878 and settled in Oakland,
California. Her mother, Amelia, died of cancer in 1888 and her
father, Daniel, died in 1891.

Stein attended Radcliffe College from 1893 to 1897, where she

specialized in Psychology under noted psychologist William
James. After leaving Radcliffe, she enrolled at the Johns
Hopkins University, where she studied medicine for four years,
leaving in 1901. Stein did not receive a formal degree from
either institution.

In 1903, Stein moved to Paris with Alice B. Toklas, a younger

friend from San Francisco who would remain her partner and
secretary throughout her life. The couple did not return to the
United States for over thirty years.
Together with Toklas and her brother Leo, an art critic and
painter, Stein took an apartment on the Left Bank. Their home,
27 rue de Fleurus, soon became gathering spot for many young
artists and writers including Henri Matisse, Ezra Pound, Pablo
Picasso, Max Jacob, and Guillaume Apollinaire.

She was a passionate advocate for the new in art, her literary
friendships grew to include writers as diverse as William Carlos
Williams, Djuana Barnes, F. Scott Fitzgerald, James Joyce, and
Ernest Hemingway. It was to Hemingway that Stein coined the
phrase the lost generation to describe the expatriate writers
living abroad between the wars.

By 1913, Steins support of cubist painters and her increasingly

avant-garde writing caused a split with her brother Leo, who
moved to Florence. Her first book, Three Lives, was published
in 1909. She followed it with Tender Buttons in 1914.

Tender Buttons clearly showed the profound effect modern

painting had on her writing. In these small prose poems,
images and phrases come together in often surprising ways
similar in manner to cubist painting. Her writing, characterized
by its use of words for their associations and sounds rather
than their meanings, received considerable interest from other
artists and writers, but did not find a wide audience.

Sherwood Anderson in the introduction to Geography and

Plays (1922) wrote that her writing consists in a rebuilding,
and entire new recasting of life, in the city of words.

Among Steins most influential works are The Making of

Americans (1925); How to Write (1931); The Autobiography of
Alice B. Toklas (1933), which was a best-seller; and Stanzas in
Meditation and Other Poems [1929-1933] (1956).
In 1934, the biographer T. S. Matthews described her as a
solid elderly woman, dressed in no-nonsense rough-spun
clothes," with deep black eyes that make her grave face and
its archaic smile come alive.

Stein died at the American Hospital at Neuilly on July 27, 1946,

of inoperable cancer.

Selected Bibliography

Three Lives (1909)

Tender Buttons (1914)
Geography and Plays (1922)
The Making of Americans (written 1906-1908, published 1925)
Four Saints in Three Acts (libretto, 1929; music by Virgil
Thomson, 1934)
How to Write (1931)
The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933)
Lectures in America (1935)
The Geographical History of America: or, The Relation of
Human Nature to the Human Mind (1936)
Everybodys Autobiography (1937)
Picasso (1938)
Paris France (1940)
Ida; a novel (1941)
Wars I Have Seen (1945)
Reflections on the Atom Bomb (1946)
Brewsie and Willie (1946)
The Mother of Us All (libretto, published 1949; music by Virgil
Thompson 1947)
Last Operas and Plays (1949)
The Things as They Are (written as Q.E.D. in 1903, published
1950)
Patriarchal Poetry (1953)
Alphabets and Birthdays (1957)