Gertrude Stein

Born: February 3, 1874
Allegheny, Pennsylvania
Died: July 27, 1946
Neuilly, France
American writer

American writer Gertrude Stein was a powerful literary force in the early part of the twentieth century. Although the ultimate value of her writing was a matter of debate, it greatly affected the work of a generation of American writers.

Childhood

Gertrude Stein was born in Allegheny, Pennsylvania, on February 3, 1874, the youngest of five children of Daniel and Amelia Stein, her wealthy German-Jewish-American parents. As a child, she lived in Vienna, Austria, and Paris, France, but grew up mainly in Oakland, and San Francisco, California. Living in these different countries, she learned to speak German, French, and English fluently. She also learned music and dance. Her early formal education was spotty, but she was a dedicated reader and had a strong interest in art. When Stein was fourteen her mother died, followed by her father just three years later. With the family splintered, Stein, along with one sister, moved to Baltimore, Maryland, to live with her aunt.

With only a year of high school, Stein managed to be admitted in 1893 to Radcliffe College, in Massachusetts, where she specialized in psychology (the study of the mind) and became a favorite of psychologist and philosopher (one who seeks wisdom about humans and their place in the universe) William James (1842–1910). He discovered her great capacity for automatic writing, in which the conscious waking mind is suspended and the unconscious sleeping mind takes over. The emphasis of the primitive mind at the expense of the sophisticated mind was to become an important part in Stein's theory and is demonstrated in most of her writing.

Moves to France

Stein did not take a degree at Radcliffe or Johns Hopkins University, in Maryland, where she studied medicine for four years. In 1903 she went to Paris, France, and took up residence on the Left Bank (a famous neighborhood in Paris) with her brother Leo. In 1907 she met Alice B. Toklas (1877–1967), a wealthy young San Franciscan who became her lifelong companion and secretary, running the household, typing manuscripts, and screening visitors. France became their permanent home.

During Stein's early Paris years she established herself as a champion of the avant-garde painters, or artists that strive for new methods and techniques within their art. With her inherited wealth she supported young artists and knew virtually all of the important painters, including Pablo Picasso (1881–1973), who did a famous portrait of her, Henri Matisse (1869–1954), Juan Gris (1887–1927), Andrée Derain (1880–1954), and Georges Braque (1882–1963). Her brother Leo became a famous art critic, but their relationship, which had been extremely close, fell apart in 1912 because of a disagreement over his marriage.

Stein's first two books, Three Lives (1909) and Tender Buttons (1915), stirred considerable interest among a limited but sophisticated audience, and her home became an informal meeting place visited by many creative people, including American composer Virgil Thomson (1896–1969), British writers Ford Madox Ford (1873–1939), Lytton Strachey (1880–1932), and Edith Sitwell (1887–1964), and American writers Ezra Pound (1885–1972), Elliot Paul (1891–1958), Sherwood Anderson (1876–1941), F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940), and Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961). It was to Hemingway that Stein characterized the disenchanted expatriate veterans (those living overseas) as a "lost generation."

A woman with deep black eyes and a supremely self-assured manner, Stein was frequently intimidating, impatient with disagreement, and oftentimes pushed people away. The unique style of her writing appealed primarily to a small audience, but her reputation as a patron of the arts was lifelong.

Stein's 1934 visit to the United States for the opening of her opera Four Saints in Three Acts, with music by Virgil Thomson, started an enormously successful university lecture tour. During the German occupation of France (the time during World War II when German forces took over large portions of France), both Stein and Toklas lived briefly in Culoz, France, returning to Paris in 1944. Stein's reactions to World War II (1939–45; a war in which American-led British, French, Soviet, and American forces battled those led by Germany) were recorded in Paris, France (1940) and Wars I Have Seen (1945), and her interest in the soldiers was reflected in the conversations of Brewsie and Willie (1946), which was published a week before her death, on July 27, 1946, in Neuilly, France.

Her writings

Stein's first book, Three Lives, her most realistic work, foreshadowed her more abstract (conceptual and not easily expressed by conventional methods) writings and demonstrated a number of influences including, Gustave Flaubert's (1821–1880) Trois contes, and automatic writing. "Melanctha," the best of the three novellas (written pieces that are shorter than a novel but longer than a short story) that made up the book, was an especially tender treatment of an impulsive, flirting African American woman whose relations with men were recorded in a informal, deliberately repetitious style intended to capture the immediacy of consciousness. Stein wanted to give literature the plastic freedom that painting has, and Tender Buttons was a striking attempt at verbal "portraits" in the manner of the cubist painters, an early twentieth-century movement that emphasized the use of geometric shapes.

Stein's The Making of Americans: Being a History of a Family's Progress (1925) gave character analysis within a family chronicle, although it was chiefly concerned with the servants and only very little with the family members. In the 1930s and 1940s she concentrated on memoirs (an account of personal experience), aesthetic theory, plays, and art criticism. How to Write (1931) and The Geographical History of America: The Relation of Human Nature to the Human Mind (1936) explained the theoretical basis of her literary practice.

The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933), written as if by Toklas, was an autobiography of Stein. Unexpectedly readable and charming, it became a best-seller. Critic F. W. Dupee called it "one of the best memoirs in American literature." A sequel, Everybody's Autobiography (1937), described Stein's visit to America, and Portraits and Prayers (1934) was a collection of verbal pictures of her Paris circle.

Stein's libretto (opera) for Four Saints in Three Acts (1934) was a study of the attraction of opposites—the self-disciplined and the compassionate. Picasso (1939) was an inconsistent, witty, sometimes illuminating study of the development of the great painter's art. Her three wartime books and In Savoy; Or Yes Is for a Very Young Man: A Play of the Resistance in France (1946) showed unexpected social concern.

After Stein's death, there were numerous publications of the works she left behind. Some of the more notable are The Previously Uncollected Writings of Gertrude Stein and Dear Sammy: Letters from Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas. These works were released in 1974 and 1977 respectively. In 1996 Stein's Four Saints in Three Acts was remade into an avant-garde opera.

For More Information

Bridgman, Richard. Gertrude Stein in Pieces. New York: Oxford University Press, 1970.

Simon, Linda. Gertrude Stein Remembered. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994.

Souhami, Diana. Gertrude and Alice. San Francisco: Pandora, 1992.

Wineapple, Brenda. Sister Brother: Gertrude and Leo Stein. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1996.

Gertrude Stein

American writer Gertrude Stein (1874-1946) was a powerful literary force in the period around World War I. Although the ultimate value of her writing was a matter of debate, in its time it profoundly affected the work of a generation of American writers.

Gertrude Stein was born in Allegheny, Pennsylvania, on February 3, 1874, the youngest of five children of affluent German-Jewish-American parents. As a child, she lived in Vienna and Paris but grew up mainly in Oakland and San Francisco, California. Her early formal education was spotty, but she was an avid reader and had a strong interest in art. With only a year of high school, she managed to be admitted in 1893 to Radcliffe College, where she specialized in psychology and became a favorite of William James. He discovered her great capacity for automatic writing, in which the conscious mind is suspended and the unconscious directly evoked. The exaltation of the primitive mind at the expense of the sophisticated mind was to become an important principle in Stein's esthetic theory and is manifest in most of her writing.

The Expatriate

Stein did not take a degree at Radcliffe or at Johns Hopkins, where she studied medicine for 4 years. In 1903 she went to Paris and took up residence on the Left Bank with her brother Leo. In 1907 she met Alice B. Toklas, a wealthy young San Franciscan who became her lifelong companion and secretary, running the household, typing manuscripts, and screening visitors. France became their permanent home.

In her early Paris years Stein established herself as a champion of the painting avant-garde. With her inherited wealth she patronized young artists and knew virtually all of the important painters, including Pablo Picasso, who did a famous portrait of her, Henri Matisse, Juan Gris, André Derain, and Georges Braque. Her brother Leo became a famous art critic, but their relationship, which had been extremely close, became permanently estranged in 1912 because of a disagreement over his marriage.

Stein's first two books, Three Lives (1909) and Tender Buttons (1915), stirred considerable interest among a limited but sophisticated audience, and her home became an informal salon visited by many creative people, including American composer Virgil Thomson, British writers Ford Madox Ford, Lytton Strachey, and Edith Sitwell, and American writers Ezra Pound, Elliot Paul, Sherwood Anderson, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Ernest Hemingway. It was to Hemingway that Stein characterized the disenchanted expatriate veterans as a "lost generation."

A woman with deep black eyes and a supremely self-assured manner, Stein was frequently intimidating, impatient with disagreement, and prone to alienate associates. The stylistic innovations and peculiarities of her writing appealed primarily to a small coterie, but her prestige as a taste maker was lifelong.

Stein's 1934 visit to the United States for the opening of her opera Four Saints in Three Acts, with music by Virgil Thomson, culminated in an enormously successful university lecture tour. During the German occupation of France, both Stein and Toklas lived briefly in Culoz, returning to Paris in 1944. Stein's reactions to World War II were recorded in Paris, France (1940) and Wars I Have Seen (1945), and her interest in the soldiers was reflected in the idiomatic conversations of Brewsie and Willie (1946), which was published a week before her death, on July 27, 1946, in Neuilly.

Her Writings

Stein's first book, Three Lives, her most realistic work, foreshadowed her more abstract writings and evinced a number of influences: neoprimitivist painting, Flaubert's Trois contes, and automatic writing. "Melanctha," the best of the three novelettes that constituted the book, was an especially tender treatment of an impulsive, flirtatious African-American woman whose relations with men were recorded in a colloquial, deliberately repetitious style intended to capture the immediacy of consciousness; indeed, incremental repetition is the crucial element of Stein's style, which was perhaps most accurately called "subjective realism."

Stein wanted to give literature the plastic freedom that painting has, and Tender Buttons was a striking attempt at verbal "portraits" in the manner of the cubist painters. The denotative value of words was almost entirely abandoned; instead, words were used in a connotative, associative, and surrealistic way.

The Making of Americans: Being a History of a Family's Progress (1925) gave character analysis within a family chronicle, although it was chiefly concerned with the servants and only marginally with the family members. In the 1930s and 1940s she concentrated on memoirs, esthetic theory, plays, and art criticism. How to Write (1931) and The Geographical History of America: The Relation of Human Nature to the Human Mind (1936) explained the theoretical basis of her literary practice.

The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933), written as if by Toklas, was an autobiography of Stein. Unexpectedly intelligible and charming, it became a best seller. Critic F. W. Dupee called it "one of the best memoirs in American literature." A sequel, Everybody's Autobiography (1937), described Stein's visit to America, and Portraits and Prayers (1934) was a collection of verbal pictures of her Paris circle.

Stein's libretto for Four Saints in Three Acts (1934) was a study of the attraction of opposites—the ascetic and the compassionate. Similar to her nondramatic work in its surrealism and plotlessness, shored up by music and spectacle, it was better received than most of her writings. Picasso (1939) was an erratic, witty, sometimes illuminating study of the development of the great painter's art. Her three wartime books and In Savoy; or Yes Is for a Very Young Man: A Play of the Resistance in France (1946) showed unexpected social concern.

After Stein's death, there were numerous publications of the works she left behind. Some of the more notable are The Previously Uncollected Writings of Gertrude Steinand Dear Sammy: Letters from Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas. These works were released in 1974 and 1977 respectively. In 1996 Stein's Four Saints in Three Acts was remade into an avant-garde opera.

Further Reading

Stein remains a controversial figure. The closest to a definitive study was Richard Bridgman, Gertrude Stein in Pieces (1970). The most adulatory study was William G. Rogers, When This You See, Remember Me: Gertrude Stein in Person (1948); and the most damaging books were by her brother, Leo Stein, Appreciations: Painting, Poetry and Prose (1947), and by Benjamin L. Reid, Art by Subtraction: A Dissenting Opinion on Gertrude Stein (1958). The best studies were in Edmund Wilson, Axel's Castle (1931); Donald Sutherland's sympathetic and judicious critical work, Gertrude Stein: A Biography of Her Work (1951); John Malcolm Brinnin's biography, The Third Rose: Gertrude Stein and Her World (1959); Allegra Stewart, Gertrude Stein and the Present (1967); and Norman Weinstein's scholarly Gertrude Stein and the Literature of the Modern Consciousness (1970). Stein was discussed in George Wickes, Americans in Paris (1969). Information regarding the new opera based on Stein's work can be read about in Time (March 11, 1996). □

Stein, Gertrude (1874–1946),born in Pennsylvania, was educated abroad, at California schools, and graduated from Radcliffe (1897). She was stimulated at college by William James, and her psychological experiments led her to study the anatomy of the brain at Johns Hopkins. Tiring of scientific work, she went abroad (1902), where she lived until her death, her salon in France attracting prominent writers as well as painters, particularly Matisse, Picasso, and Juan Gris, whose works she collected. Her early fiction, including Three Lives (1909), stories of two servant girls and an unhappy black woman; The Making of Americans (1925); and A Long Gay Book (1932), shows a breakdown of traditional plot structure and discursive writing, and dependence upon intuitive means of expressing the actual present.

Her later writings include Tender Buttons (1914), poetry without conventional logic or grammar, intended to express the qualities of objects; Geography and Plays (1922); Composition as Explanation (1926), lectures given at Oxford and Cambridge; Lucy Church Amiably (1930), a novel; How To Write (1931), a book of examples; The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933), her own autobiography, composed as though by her secretary and friend Alice B. Toklas; Four Saints in Three Acts (1934), an opera with music by Virgil Thomson; Portraits and Prayers (1934); Narration (1935), four critical lectures delivered at the University of Chicago; The Geographical History of America (1936), a formless work illustrating her literary theories; Everybody's Autobiography (1937), an account of her American lecture tour; Picasso (1938); The World Is Round (1939), a book for children; Paris France (1940), a sympathetic study of the French way of life; Ida (1941), a “novel”; Wars I Have Seen (1945) and Yes Is For a Very Young Man (1946), about life in France during World War II, respectively in a personal account and a play; and Brewsie and Willie (1946), about lives of American soldiers in France during World War II.

Her Lectures in America (1935) explains her philosophy of composition, which is partly indebted to the aesthetic theories of William James and Bergson's concept of time. She contends that it is the “business of art” to live in “the complete actual present,” and in describing her technique she compares it with that of the cinema. No two frames of a motion picture are exactly alike, yet the sequence presents to the eye a flowing continuity. Similarly, Miss Stein, by the use of partly repetitive statements, each making a limited advance in the theme, presents an uninterrupted series of instantaneous visions, so that one grasps a living moment in precise, ordered forms. This “moment to moment emphasis in what is happening” appears particularly in her early “portraits,” and in Three Lives and The Making of Americans. Another of her concerns was “to tell what each one is without telling stories …so that the essence of what happened would be …the essence of the portraits.” She was also interested in “the relation between color and sound.”

In order to convey her concept of movement in the motion‐picture manner, she set up a rhythmic pattern and placed her emphasis upon the verb. Nouns being names, she felt that “things once they are named the name does not go on doing anything to them and so why write in nouns.” She felt that most punctuation is “an unnecessary name of something.” “It is evident that when you ask a question you ask a question …and so why add to it the question mark.” Other punctuation also interfered with the need for capturing motion: “If writing should go on what had colons and semicolons to do with it.” In her poetry she holds a different theory about language; for, though naming, or noun‐using, does not carry prose forward, “you can love a name and if you love a name then saying that name any number of times only makes you love it more …” and poetry is “really loving the name of anything.” Thus, for her, poetry is a method of dealing “with everything that was not movement in space.”

Her practice of these theories influenced other authors. Sherwood Anderson felt that she revivified language and was stimulated by her method of repetition with minute variations, as was Hemingway, both in the rhythms of his prose and in his way of conveying emotions as immediate experience. Yale, which inherited her manuscripts, in 1951 began printing all unpublished works, initially edited by Van Vechten.

Gertrude Stein 1874–1946, American author and patron of the arts, b. Allegheny (now part of Pittsburgh), Pa. A celebrated personality, she encouraged, aided, and influenced—through her patronage as well as through her writing—many literary and artistic figures. After attending (1893–97) Radcliffe, where she was a student of William James , she began premedical work at Johns Hopkins. In 1902, relinquishing her studies, she went abroad and from 1903 until her death lived chiefly in Paris. For many years her secretary and lover was Alice B. Toklas. In Paris, Stein became interested in modern art movements; she encouraged and purchased the work of many new painters, including Picasso and Matisse . During the 1920s, she was the leader of a cultural salon that included such writers as Hemingway , Sherwood Anderson , and F. Scott Fitzgerald , all of whose works she influenced. It was she who first coined the phrase "lost generation" for those post–World War I expatriates. During World War II she remained in France, and after the war her Paris home became a meeting place for American soldiers.

Stein's own innovative writing emphasizes the sounds and rhythms rather than the sense of words. By departing from conventional meaning, grammar, and syntax, she attempted to capture "moments of consciousness," independent of time and memory. Her first published work was Three Lives (completed 1905, pub. 1909), short stories in which she explored the mental processes of three women, but her most characteristic and probably most difficult narrative is the lengthy, dark, dense, and repetitive The Making of Americans (completed 1911, pub. 1925). The famous Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933), a linear narrative written in relatively ordinary language, is the story of her own life presented as that of her companion. Stein's critical essays were published as Composition as Explanation (1926), How to Write (1931), Narration (1935), and Lectures in America (1935). Her many other works include the volume of poetry Tender Buttons (1914), a series of "cubist" verbal portraits; two librettos for the operas of Virgil Thomson, Four Saints in Three Acts (1934) and The Mother of Us All (1947); Wars I Have Seen (1945), some personal observations; and Brewsie and Willie (1946), about American soldiers in France.

Bibliography: See biographies by J. M. Brinnin (1959, repr. 1987) and J. Hobhouse (1975); D. Souhami, Gertrude and Alice (1992); B. Kellner, ed., A Gertrude Stein Companion (1988); A. B. Toklas, What Is Remembered (1963, repr. 1985); J. R. Mellow, Charmed Circle: Gertrude Stein & Company (1974, repr. 1991); L. Simon, ed., Gertrude Stein Remembered (1994); B. Wineapple, Sister Brother: Gertrude and Leo Stein (1996); J. Malcolm, Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice (2007); studies by R. Dubnick (1984), J. L. Walker (1984), and U. E. Dydo (2003); bibliography by R. A. Wilson and A. Uphill (1999).

Stein, Gertrude (1874–1946). American writer, collector, hostess, eccentric, and self-styled genius, born at Allegheny, Pennsylvania, into a wealthy family. After abandoning medical studies she settled in Paris in 1903, returning only once to the USA, for a lecture tour in 1934. Her home at 27 rue de Fleurus became famous as a literary and artistic salon; many distinguished American visitors to Paris found it their introduction to modern French painting. With her brother, the art critic Leo Stein (1872–1947), who lived with her from 1903 to 1912, she was one of the first collectors of the work of Braque, Matisse, and Picasso (who painted a well-known portrait of Gertrude, 1906, Metropolitan Museum, New York); another brother, Michael (1865–1938), and his wife Sarah (1870–1953), were also collectors. Gertrude's writings, which she claimed to be a literary counterpart to Cubism, are often opaque in style, concerned with the rhythm and sound of words rather than their meaning. The best-known and most approachable of her many books is The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933), which in fact is her own autobiography, composed as though by Miss Toklas (1877–1967), her secretary and companion from 1907. Alfred H. Barr writes that Leo Stein was ‘the critic who first felt that Matisse and Picasso were the two important artists of his time', but Leo later turned his back on their work, describing Cubism as ‘god-almighty rubbish'. Clive Bell maintained that ‘Neither Gertrude or Leo had a genuine feeling for visual art … Pictures were pegs on which to hang hypotheses.’ On her death, Gertrude's art collection passed to Miss Toklas, and when she in turn died in 1967 it was sold. Several of the paintings eventually went to leading public collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

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.

Stein, Gertrude (b Allegheny [now part of Pittsburgh], 3 Feb. 1874; d Neuilly-sur-Seine, 27 July 1946). American writer, collector, hostess, eccentric, and self-styled genius. She settled in Paris in 1903 and her home at 27 rue de Fleurus became famous as a literary and artistic salon; many distinguished American visitors to Paris found it their introduction to modern French painting. With her brother, the art critic Leo Stein (b Allegheny, 11 May 1872; d Settignano, nr. Florence, 29 July 1947), who lived with her from 1903 to 1912, she was one of the first collectors of the work of Braque, Matisse, and Picasso (who painted a well-known portrait of Gertrude, 1905–6, Met. Mus., New York); another brother, Michael (1865–1938), and his wife Sarah (1870–1953), were also collectors. Gertrude's writings, which she claimed to be a literary counterpart to Cubism, are often opaque in style, concerned with the rhythm and sound of words rather than their meaning. The best-known and most approachable of her many books is The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933), which in fact is her own autobiography, composed as though by Miss Toklas (1877–1967), her secretary and companion from 1907. Alfred H. Barr writes that Leo Stein was ‘the critic who first felt that Matisse and Picasso were the two important artists of his time’, but Stein later turned his back on their work, describing Cubism as ‘godalmighty rubbish’. Clive Bell maintained that ‘Neither Gertrude or Leo had a genuine feeling for visual art…Pictures were pegs on which to hang hypotheses.’

Stein, Gertrude (1874–1946). American writer, collector, hostess, eccentric, and self-styled genius. She settled in Paris in 1903 and her home at 27 rue de Fleurus became famous as a literary and artistic salon; many distinguished American visitors to Paris found it their introduction to modern French painting. With her brother, the art critic Leo Stein (1872–1947), who lived with her from 1903 to 1912, she was one of the first collectors of the work of Braque, Matisse, and Picasso (who painted a well-known portrait of Gertrude, 1905–6, Met. Mus., New York); another brother, Michael, and his wife Sarah, were also collectors. Gertrude's writings, which she claimed to be a literary counterpart to Cubism, are often opaque in style, concerned with the rhythm and sound of words rather than their meaning. The best-known and most approachable of her many books is The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933), which in fact is her own autobiography, composed as though by Miss Toklas (1877–1967), her secretary and companion from 1907. Alfred H. Barr, Jr., writes that Leo Stein was ‘the critic who first felt that Matisse and Picasso were the two important artists of his time’, but Stein later turned his back on their work, describing Cubism as ‘godalmighty rubbish’. Clive Bell maintained that ‘Neither Gertrude or Leo had a genuine feeling for visual art … Pictures were pegs on which to hang hypotheses.’

Stein, Gertrude (1874–1946) US writer and critic. Stein was influential in the US expatriate community in Paris. Her prodigious, experimental output includes the novel Three Lives (1909) and The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933), a fictionalized account of her life from her lover's point of view.