Gertrude was born on February 3, 1874, in Allegheny, Pa. and died in Paris in 1946.
She was an avant-garde American writer, eccentric, and self-styled genius, whose Paris home was a salon for the leading artists and writers of the period between World Wars I and II.
Stein spent her infancy in Vienna and Paris and her girlhood in Oakland, Calif. She went to one of the finest American Universites for women, Radcliffe. There she studied psychology with the philosopher William James. After further study at Johns Hopkins medical school she went to Paris.
Her lifelong companion was Alice B. Tolkas.
At her salon they mingled with expatriate American writers, such as Sherwood Anderson and Ernest Hemingway, and other visitors drawn by her literary reputation. Her literary and artistic judgments were revered, and her chance remarks could make or destroy reputations. In her own work, she attempted to parallel the theories of Cubism, specifically in her concentration on the illumination of the present moment and her use of slightly varied repetitions and extreme simplification and fragmentation. Her writing style was influenced by cubism. In some instances we find the adjective first and noun following with the verb in the middle. In Tender Buttons (1914) she writes:
Her only book to reach a wide public was The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933), actually Stein's own autobiography. The performance in the United States of her Four Saints in Three Acts (1934), which the composer Virgil Thomson had made into an opera, led to a triumphal American lecture tour in 1934-35. Thomson also wrote the music for her second opera, The Mother of Us All (published 1947), based on the life of feminist Susan B. Anthony.
Stein became a legend in Paris, especially after surviving the German occupation of France and befriending the many young American servicemen who visited her. She wrote about these soldiers in Brewsie and Willie (1946).
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