Gertrude Stein

(1874-1946)

Gertrude Stein (1874-1946)

• Born in Allegheny, Pennsylvania, Stein was educated at Radcliffe College and the medical school of Johns Hopkins University.

• In 1903 she settled in Paris, France, where she lived for the rest of her life.

• In 1907 she met American writer Alice B. Toklas, and the two lived together.

Early works:

• Three Lives (1909), character studies of three women;

• Tender Buttons (1914), a book of experimental verse;

• The Making of Americans (1925), a novel dealing with the social and cultural history of her own family.

Innovations:

• an unconventional narrative form

• a simplification and fragmentation of plot

• radical innovations in syntax and punctuation

• rhythmic repetition of words to explore the consciousness of her characters

• experiments with the uses of language

• Lectures in America (1935), a collection of talks on literature, painting, which contains some of her theories of composition and music.

• Lucy Church Amiably (1930), a novel;

• The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933), which was actually Stein's own autobiography;

• Four Saints in Three Acts (1934), an opera with a score by the American composer Virgil Thomson;

• Paris France (1940), an appreciation of her adopted country.

• Wars I Have Seen (1945) is the story of her daily life in France under the German occupation during World War II,

• Brewsie and Willie (1946) is a sympathetic study of American servicemen in France whom she befriended.

• The Mother of Us All (1947), an opera based on the life of the American social reformer Susan B. Anthony, with music by Virgil Thomson;

• Last Operas and Plays (1949); and Two and Other Early Portraits (1951).

Art

• The Stein-Toklas apartment in Paris was the center of an important literary group, where writers such as Sherwood Anderson, Ernest Hemingway, and Thornton Wilder were encouraged by Stein in the development of their own literary styles.

• Her salon was frequented by such 20th-century masters as the Spanish artist Pablo Picasso and the French painter Henri Matisse.

• Stein was a patron of early 20th-century painting, especially the cubist movement.

• She was instrumental in bringing modern art to the attention of a wide international audience.

• Stein's papers were bequeathed to Yale University.

• Her art collection is dispersed in several U.S. collections.

Pablo Picasso, Portrait of Gertrude Stein, 1906, oil on canvas. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Stein bequeathed the portrait to the Metropolitan in 1946.

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