Gertrude Stein

Literature / Writers Datebook: February 3

American Avant-Garde Author and Poet   

 

Brief biography of American writer Gertrude Stein, famous for Three Lives and the Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas.

American writer and poet Gertrude Stein is considered on of the great authors of the United States. She is best known for the phrase "A rose is a rose is a rose" and famous for her books Three Lives and The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas.

 

 

 

Even though she lived most of her life in Paris, Gertrude Stein is an important figure in American literature, primarily significant in the development of modern art and literature. The famous phrase "A rose is a rose is a rose" was written by Stein as part of the 1913 poem "Sacred Emily" meant to be a woman's name. Later, Stein used variations on the phrase in her other writings, the phrase often interpreted as "things are what they are."    

Early Life of Gertrude Stein

Gertrude Stein was born in Allegheny, Pennsylvania on February 3, 1874, and lived in Austria and France as a child. Her father had become wealthy through his investments in street railroads and real estate. She studied at Radcliffe College and Johns Hopkins University, where she was a medical student.

Life in Paris

Stein was devoted to her artistic brother Leo Stein, and when he went to live in Paris, she deliberately failed her exams in order to leave university and be with him. In Paris they established a famous salon in 27 rue de Fleurus – a kind of private club where intellectuals and artists met to discuss ideas in art and politics.

Paris with Great Artists

These were most exciting times in Paris, in which artists such as Paul Cézanne, Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso were experimenting with new forms of painting. Stein wanted to create a literary version of the new art. Three Lives, Stein's first novel and her first attempt to achieve this new form of literature, was published when she was 35.

Life with Alice B. Toklas after Leo

Stein and her brother Leo gradually parted ways to live their own lives. Another American woman writer living in Paris, Alice B. Toklas, moved in with Stein in 1907 and became her lifelong companion. Their apartment was a center of Parisian culture in the years between the two World Wars.

Prominent fellow-writer friends

Aside from the French artists, important American writers such as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sherwood Anderson and Ernest Hemingway were Stein's regular visitors. She wrote about those times in her experimental book The Making of Americans.

Last Years

She died in 1946 from stomach cancer, aged 72. Stein has a monument in New York, on the upper terrace of Bryant Park.   

Legacy

Gertrude Stein is credited with bringing the term "Lost Generation" into use. During the 1930s, Stein and Toklas became famous with the 1933 mass-market publication of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. She and Alice had an extended lecture tour in the United States during this decade.

 

Works by Gertrude Stein

Three Lives, 1909

The Making of Americans, 1925

Lucy Church Amiably, 1930

The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas

Four Saints in Three Acts, 1934

Lectures in America, 1935

Wars I have Seen, 1945

Browsie and Willie, 1946

The Mother of Us All, 1947 (published after she died)

 

Photo Credit:

Gertrude Stein. NNDB.com / Public Domain

 

Resources:

Biographical Dictionary, edited by Una McGovern, Chambers (2002)

Dictionary of Writers, edited by Rosemary Goring, Larousse (1994)   

 

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