Gertrude Stein

Gertrude Stein was born on February 3, 1874, in Allegheny, Pennsylvania, a city later absorbed into Pittsburgh. She was the youngest of five surviving children of Daniel Stein and Amelia Keyser Stein, German Jewish immigrants who had built a comfortable living in business ^[1]. The family did not stay put. When Gertrude was still an infant the Steins moved to Vienna, then to Paris, giving her an early immersion in European languages and cities before the family settled in Oakland, California, in 1878 ^[2].

Her childhood in Oakland was bookish and somewhat solitary. Both parents died while she was a teenager, her mother in 1888 and her father in 1891, and the older children took charge of the family finances. Her brother Michael managed the estate well enough to give his siblings modest independent incomes for life, a fact that shaped everything that followed ^[1]. Gertrude grew closest to her brother Leo, two years her senior, and followed him east when he enrolled at Harvard.

In 1893 she entered the Harvard Annex, soon renamed Radcliffe College, where she studied psychology under William James. James regarded her as a gifted student, and she co-published early experimental work on automatic writing while still an undergraduate ^[3]. At his urging she went on to Johns Hopkins Medical School in 1897 to prepare for a career in the psychology of the mind. She lost interest, failed several courses in her final year, and left in 1901 without a degree, a decision she never appeared to regret ^[2].

The decisive move of Stein's life came in 1903, when she joined Leo in Paris at 27 rue de Fleurus on the Left Bank. Brother and sister began buying paintings that most collectors would not touch. They acquired works by Cézanne, Gauguin, and Renoir, and in 1905 they purchased Matisse's Woman with a Hat, a canvas that had scandalized visitors to the Salon d'Automne that year ^[4]. Soon afterward they began buying from a young and still obscure Spaniard named Pablo Picasso.

Their Saturday evening gatherings turned the apartment into an informal academy of modern art. Painters, writers, and curious visitors came to argue in front of walls hung floor to ceiling with pictures no museum yet wanted. Picasso painted his famous portrait of Stein in 1905 and 1906, reworking the face after dozens of sittings; the painting now hangs in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York ^[5]. When someone objected that Stein did not look like the portrait, she reported Picasso's reply that she would.

Gertrude and Leo eventually divided the collection and parted ways around 1913, their split driven partly by Leo's dismissal of her writing and of Cubism. Gertrude kept most of the Picassos. From then on the salon was hers, run together with Alice B. Toklas, the San Francisco woman who had arrived in Paris in 1907 and became her partner, typist, editor, and household manager for the rest of her life ^[4].

Stein's writing career is central to any Gertrude Stein biography, even though much of it found readers slowly. Her first completed novel, Q.E.D., written in 1903 and drawing on a romantic entanglement from her Baltimore years, stayed unpublished until after her death. Three Lives, portraits of three working women issued at her own expense in 1909, drew respectful notice for its repetitive, hypnotic prose rhythms ^[2]. Her enormous novel The Making of Americans, drafted between 1902 and 1911, ran to nearly a thousand pages and did not appear in print until 1925 ^[1].

Her most radical experiment was Tender Buttons (1914), a small book of prose poems about objects, food, and rooms that abandoned conventional description almost entirely. Critics mocked it, yet it became a touchstone for later avant-garde poets who read it as Cubism carried into language ^[3]. Stein insisted that she was doing with words what Picasso and Cézanne had done with paint, breaking a subject apart and recomposing it. Lines of hers entered the common stock of quotation, most famously the phrase about a rose being a rose from her 1913 poem Sacred Emily.

Commercial success arrived late and through a side door. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933), Stein's memoir of her own Paris life written playfully in her partner's voice, became a bestseller in the United States and made her a public personality at fifty nine ^[6]. She followed it with a triumphant American lecture tour in 1934 and 1935, her first return in thirty years, drawing large audiences from New York to California. That same season her opera collaboration with composer Virgil Thomson, Four Saints in Three Acts, opened with an all Black cast and became an unlikely Broadway event ^[5]. Among Gertrude Stein achievements, this double life matters: she was at once a difficult experimental writer and, by the mid 1930s, a genuine celebrity.

The partnership with Alice B. Toklas was the fixed point of Stein's adult existence. The two women met on Toklas's first day in Paris in September 1907 and were rarely apart for the next thirty nine years. Toklas typed Stein's manuscripts, cooked for the salon, screened visitors, and after 1930 helped run the Plain Edition, a small press the couple financed by selling a Picasso in order to publish Stein's unprinted work ^[6]. Their household was one of the most visible same sex partnerships of its era, presented to the world with a matter of fact confidence unusual for the time.

Stein cultivated friendships with younger American writers who reached Paris after the First World War. Ernest Hemingway came to rue de Fleurus in 1922 with a letter of introduction, absorbed her advice on compression and repetition, and later quarreled with her in print, as he did with most of his mentors ^[7]. Through Hemingway's epigraph to The Sun Also Rises, Stein's remark that his cohort was a lost generation attached itself permanently to the writers of the 1920s. F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sherwood Anderson, and Thornton Wilder also counted her as a friend and sounding board.

She could be imperious. Contemporaries described a woman serenely certain of her own genius, one who divided visitors into geniuses, who talked with her, and wives, who talked with Toklas. Yet the same accounts stress her warmth, her booming laugh, and her generosity to unknown painters and broke young writers ^[4].

During the First World War, Stein and Toklas had volunteered for the American Fund for French Wounded, with Stein driving a Ford van she named Auntie to deliver hospital supplies around France ^[2]. The Second World War tested them far more severely. As Jewish American women in occupied France, they were doubly exposed, yet they chose to remain at their country house in the Rhône valley, first at Bilignin and later at Culoz, rather than flee to Switzerland or the United States ^[6].

How they survived has occupied historians ever since. Their friend Bernard Faÿ, a scholar who held a senior cultural post under the Vichy regime, is generally credited with shielding them and their art collection from confiscation. Stein also produced a translation project connected to speeches of Philippe Pétain that she never completed, an episode that has drawn sustained scholarly scrutiny and debate about her wartime judgment ^[8]. Whatever the full accounting, the two women emerged unharmed, and Stein greeted arriving American soldiers in 1944 with open delight, writing about them in Wars I Have Seen (1945) and Brewsie and Willie (1946).

Her health failed quickly after the liberation. Diagnosed with stomach cancer, she was operated on at the American Hospital in Neuilly-sur-Seine, outside Paris, and died there on July 27, 1946, at the age of seventy two ^[1]. She was buried in Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris. By her will, Picasso's portrait of her went to the Metropolitan Museum, and Toklas retained lifetime use of the art collection.

Stein's reputation has grown steadily since her death, and the basic Gertrude Stein facts now sit inside a much larger critical conversation. Scholars of modernism treat her experiments with repetition, present tense narration, and grammatical play as a serious parallel to Cubist painting, and works once dismissed as nonsense, Tender Buttons above all, are standard reading in university courses on twentieth century literature ^[3]. Her lectures on composition and her theory of the continuous present influenced later writers from the Beats to the Language poets.

Her role as a collector and taste maker has proven just as durable. Exhibitions such as The Steins Collect, mounted in 2011 and 2012 by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Grand Palais in Paris, and the Metropolitan Museum, reconstructed the family's holdings and showed how much of the early market for Matisse and Picasso ran through the Stein households ^[4]. Her papers, filling well over a hundred boxes, are held at Yale University's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, which received them by her bequest ^[9].

She also endures as a cultural figure beyond the page. Her life with Toklas made her an early icon for gay and lesbian readers, and the salon at rue de Fleurus remains shorthand for the expatriate Paris of the 1920s, revisited in memoirs, biographies, and films. Nearly eighty years after her death, the woman who claimed she wrote for herself and strangers has no shortage of strangers still reading her ^[7].