Stein, Gertrude

Stein, Gertrude (1874–1946), American author, born in Pennsylvania into a progressive and intellectual family of German-Jewish origin. She studied psychology at Radcliffe College, where she was a student of W. James, and then studied the anatomy of the brain at Johns Hopkins. In 1902 she went with her brother Leo to Paris, where she settled; her home in the rue de Fleurus became a literary salon and art gallery and a home of the avant-garde attracting painters (including Picasso, Matisse, and Juan Gris) and writers (including Hemingway, F. M. Ford, and S. Anderson, but not Joyce, with whom she was not acquainted). Her friend, secretary, and companion from 1907 was San Francisco-born Alice B. Toklas (1877–1967), whom she made the ostensible author of her own memoir, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933).

Her fiction includes Three Lives (1909), of which the second portrait, ‘Melanctha’, was described by R. Wright as ‘the first long serious literary treatment of Negro life in the United States’ (see cultural appropriation); The Making of Americans (1925), a long work intended as a history of her family; and A Long Gay Book (1932). Tender Buttons (1914) is an example of her highly idiosyncratic poetry. Her characteristic repetitions and reprises, her flowing, unpunctuated prose, and her attempts to capture the ‘living moment’ owe much to William James and to Bergson's concept of time, and represent a personal but influential version of the stream-of-consciousness technique. Among her numerous publications are essays, sketches of life in France, works of literary theory, short stories, and Wars I Have Seen (1945), a personal account of occupied Paris.