Gertrude Stein

Writer

• Born: February 3, 1874
• Birthplace: Allegheny (now in Pittsburgh), Pennsylvania
• Died: July 27, 1946
• Place of death: Neuilly-sur-Seine, France

Poet, dramatist, and novelist

Stein became important in European art and literary circles, through her close association with avant-garde artists and through her experimental writing.

Area of achievement: Literature

Early Life

By the time Gertrude Stein (GUR-trewd STIN) turned six, she had lived in Allegheny, Pennsylvania; Vienna, Austria; Paris, France; Baltimore, Maryland; and Oakland, California. Stein was the fifth and last child of Amelia Keyser and Daniel Stein, German Jews who were immigrants to the United States and who were married in Baltimore in 1864. Daniel ran a wholesale textile business in partnership with his brothers, with stores in Allegheny and Baltimore. When the brothers quarreled, Daniel took his family to Vienna, where his wife and children lived for three years while Daniel traveled regularly between Europe and the United States on business. Late in 1878, Amelia and the children moved to France, living in Passy, close to Paris, where they resided on Gertrude Stein’s fifth birthday. Shortly after that birthday, the family relocated in Baltimore, where Amelia’s family lived. Stein, already fluent in German and French, began to learn English, which quickly became her primary language.

In 1880, Daniel moved his family to the San Francisco Bay area, and he invested in real estate and stocks. He bought an interest in the Omnibus Cable Car Company, of which he became vice president. The family lived in the Tubbs Hotel for a year before Daniel rented a house in Oakland, and after a short time they moved from it to a larger house, on ten acres of land, where the Steins could raise their own vegetables. Their neighbors, roughly the same age as the Stein children, were Isadora Duncan and her brother, Raymond.

In 1885, Amelia was diagnosed with cancer, and she died in 1888, when Stein and her brother Leo were attending Oakwood High School. They had received most of their early education from private tutors or at the Hebrew school they attended.

Daniel died in 1891, three years after Amelia. The eldest son, Michael, abandoned his studies at Johns Hopkins University to return to California and look after his siblings and to attend to his father’s financial interests. For the rest of his life, Michael served as the family’s business manager, running his late father’s enterprises and doling out regular allowances to his brothers and sisters.

By 1892, Stein and Leo were living in Baltimore with their aunt, but, when Leo enrolled in Harvard University to study philosophy, Stein followed him and registered as a special student at Harvard Annex, the university’s adjunct for women. There she studied with such well-known professors as poet and playwright William Vaughn Moody and psychologist and philosopher William James.

Life’s Work

Stein was interested in practicing medicine. She entered Johns Hopkins Medical School in 1897 and the following year received a degree in medicine. Her medical studies continued until 1901, when she left school to travel with Leo in Italy and in Great Britain. Having a regular income from her father’s estate, she did not have to concern herself with earning a living.

In 1900, Stein had a prolonged love affair with May Bookstaver, an association that she details in Q. E. D. (also known as Things as They Are) written in 1903 and 1904 but not published until 1950. Meanwhile, Leo had moved to Paris, where he rented space at 27, rue de Fleurus, an apartment in which Stein lived until 1938 and in which her famous salons took place almost weekly, attracting such writers as Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ford Maddox Ford and such painters as Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, and Paul Gauguin.

In 1903, Stein completed a draft of The Making of Americans (1925), an autobiographical work that ran to almost a thousand pages in print. The following winter, she returned to the United States; then in June, 1904, accompanied by the Cone sisters, Claribel and Etta, she joined Leo in Paris. Although she originally intended to return to the United States at the end of summer, she altered her plans and did not return to her native country until thirty years later.

In 1907, Stein met Alice B. Toklas, and it was love at first sight on both sides. Stein referred to their association as a marriage, defining her role in it as that of the husband. Toklas, a retiring woman, looked after Stein, cooked for her, shopped for the two of them, and kept the wives of interesting men busy while Stein engaged in spirited conversation with their intellectual husbands.

Alice moved into 27, rue de Fleurus early in 1910, and from that day until Stein’s death in 1946, the two were inseparable. Realizing that Alice was being exposed to some of the most fascinating people in the artistic world, Stein urged her to write a memoir. When Alice failed to do so, Stein wrote an autobiography for Alice. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933) was a best seller and remains one of Stein’s two most frequently read books, the other being Three Lives (1909).

Stein’s writing has baffled many readers, largely because of its stream-of-consciousness technique, its endless repetitions, and its solid blocks of words uninterrupted by punctuation, for which Stein bore a personal disdain. Even in a book such as Three Lives, notable for creating the first black female protagonist in American literature, the dialogue is repetitive. If, however, people eavesdrop on the conversations of working-class women such as those Stein is writing about, they will find that she captures precisely their speech patterns.

Significance

Stein sought to achieve with words what Picasso, Matisse, Gauguin, and Paul Cézanne attempted to achieve with form and color in their paintings. Her work, informed in part by her studies in psychology, strayed outside the normal bounds of conventional writing, much to the bewilderment of many readers and the condemnation of many critics.

In her lifetime, Stein was not taken seriously as such writers as William Faulkner, John Steinbeck, Hemingway, and Theodore Dreiser were. In the last half decade of her life, however, Stein began to attract more favorable analyses than had been applied to her writing in the 1930’s and early 1940’s. Among her contemporaries, her work is perhaps most comparable to that of James Joyce, whose experiments with language are often reminiscent of Stein’s writing.

Bibliography

Malcolm, Janet. Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2007. Especially valuable for its assessment of how two Jewish lesbians were able to survive in Nazi-occupied France during World War II.

Mellow, James R. Charmed Circle: Gertrude Stein and Company. New York: Praeger, 1974. A vibrant account of Stein’s life and her close association with the most significant writers and artists of her day.

Souhami, Diana. Gertrude and Alice. New York: Pandora, 1991. A warm and accurate account of the relationship between Stein and Toklas for the thirty-nine years they were a couple.

Sprigge, Elizabeth. Gertrude Stein: Her Life and Work. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1957. This authoritative biography, despite its age, remains useful and accurate in its details.

Stendahl, Renate, ed. Gertrude Stein in Words and Pictures. Chapel Hill, N.C.: Algonquin Books, 1994. Pictorial biography valuable both for its written text and for its extensive illustrations. A fine introduction to Stein.

Winter, Jonah. Gertrude Is Gertrude Is Gertrude Is Gertrude. New York: Atheneum, 2009. A whimsical book intended to introduce young readers to Stein. Calef Brown’s illustrations enhance the text considerably.