Gertrude Stein

Gertrude Stein (1874-1946), American writer, whose impact on 20th-century culture derives perhaps as much from the influence of her personality and her role as a patron of the arts as from her own creative writings. Her experiments with prose were frequently misunderstood and erroneously construed as meaningless.

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 the rest of her life. In 1907 she met American writer Alice B. Toklas, and two years later Toklas moved in with Stein. Stein's most celebrated early works were Three Lives (1909), character studies of three women; and The Making of Americans (1925), a novel dealing with the social and cultural history of her own family. For each she devised an unconventional narrative form marked by a simplification and fragmentation of plot. To evoke feeling and atmosphere she made radical innovations in syntax and punctuation, including the employment of a flowing, rhythmic repetition of words to explore the consciousness of her characters. Throughout her life Stein experimented with the uses of language. She explains some of her theories of composition in Lectures in America (1935), a collection of talks on literature, painting, and music that she delivered while on a brief tour in the United States in 1934 and 1935.

Stein's other writings before World War II (1939-1945) include Tender Buttons (1914), a book of experimental verse; 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; and 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, and Brewsie and Willie (1946) is a sympathetic study of American servicemen in France whom she befriended. Posthumously published writings include The Mother of Us All (1947), an opera based on the life of the American social reformer Susan B. Anthony, again with music by Virgil Thomson; Last Operas and Plays (1949); and Two and Other Early Portraits (1951).

For years, the Stein-Toklas apartment in Paris was the center of an important literary group, where American writers such as Sherwood Anderson, Ernest Hemingway, and Thornton Wilder were encouraged by Stein in the development of their own literary styles. Also frequenting her salon were such 20th-century masters as the Spanish artist Pablo Picasso and the French painter Henri Matisse. Stein was one of the earliest patrons of early 20th-century painting, beginning with the cubist movement (see Cubism). Through her writings and representative personal collection of innovative contemporary works, she was instrumental in bringing modern art to the attention of a wide international circle.

Stein's papers were bequeathed to Yale University. Her art collection, however, became the subject of years of litigation by her family and eventually was dispersed in several U.S. collections.