Gertrude Stein

Gertrude Stein was an American novelist, poet, playwright, and art collector, born on February 3, 1874, in Allegheny, Pennsylvania, now part of Pittsburgh. Raised in Oakland, California, she came from an upper-middle-class Jewish family in which German and English were spoken at home. As a child she lived for a time in Vienna and Paris before the family returned to the United States. In 1903, she moved to Paris again, and France remained her home for the rest of her life.

Stein became closely associated with modernism in literature and art. In Paris, she hosted a salon where Pablo Picasso, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sinclair Lewis, Ezra Pound, Sherwood Anderson, and Henri Matisse were among the figures who met. She was both a maker of experimental writing and a collector of modern art, living at the center of a circle that helped define the artistic life of her era.

Her books include Q.E.D. (1903), about a lesbian romantic affair involving several of her friends; Fernhurst, a fictional story about a love triangle; Three Lives (1905–06); The Making of Americans (1902–1911); and Tender Buttons (1914). In 1933 she published The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, a quasi-memoir of her Paris years written in the voice of Alice B. Toklas, her life partner. The book became a literary bestseller and brought Stein from the relative obscurity of the cult-literature scene into mainstream attention.

The habits of thought behind Stein’s writing were shaped early. In Oakland, formal schooling did not excite her, but she immersed herself in Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Scott, Burns, Smollett, Fielding, and others. After the deaths of her mother and father, she lived for a period in Baltimore with her mother’s family, where she came to know Claribel and Etta Cone. Their Saturday evening salons, with their talk of art, offered a model Stein would later echo in Paris.

At Radcliffe College, then an annex of Harvard University, Stein studied with psychologist William James, who called her his “most brilliant woman student.” Under his supervision, she took part in experiments on normal motor automatism, work connected to ideas about divided attention and “stream of consciousness.” She later rejected the idea of automatic writing, saying that writing was too complicated to be automatic. James encouraged her to enter Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, but Stein lost interest, failed an important course in her fourth year, and left. Her time there was marked by stress in a male-dominated medical culture and by her struggle to find an identity outside conventional female roles.

Stein’s life in France also carries difficult questions. During World War II, as a Jew living in Nazi-occupied France, her ability to maintain her life as an art collector and ensure her safety has been analyzed in connection with the protection of Bernard Faÿ, a powerful Vichy official and Nazi collaborator. After the war, she expressed admiration for Marshal Pétain, another Nazi collaborator. Yet her writing remains widely quoted, especially lines such as “Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose” and “there is no there there,” phrases that keep drawing readers because they make ordinary words feel strange, exact, and open to argument.