Stein, Gertrude

Stein, Gertrude (1874-1946), American writer, whose impact on 20th-century culture derives perhaps as much from the influence of her personality and her role as a patron of the arts as from her own creative writings.

Stein was born in Allegheny, Pennsylvania, on February 3, 1874, and educated at Radcliffe College and the medical school of Johns Hopkins University. In 1903 she settled in Paris, where with her friend, the American writer, Alice B. Toklas, she lived the rest of her life. Stein's most celebrated early works were Three Lives (1909), character studies of three women, and The Making of Americans (1925), a novel dealing with the social and cultural history of her own family. For each she devised an unconventional narrative form in which plot is almost wholly eliminated and a free prose style, embodying radical innovations in syntax and punctuation, is used. Throughout her life Stein experimented with the uses of language. She explains some of her theories of composition in Lectures in America (1935), a collection of talks that she delivered while on a brief tour in the United States in 1934-1935.

Stein's other writings before World War II include Tender Buttons (1915), a book of experimental verse; Lucy Church Amiably (1930), a novel; The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933), which was actually her own autobiography; Four Saints in Three Acts (1934), an opera with a score by the American composer Virgil Thomson; and Paris France (1940), an appreciation of her adopted country. Wars I Have Seen (1945) is the story of her daily life in France under the German occupation during World War II, and Brewsie and Willie (1946) is a sympathetic study of American servicemen in France whom she befriended. Posthumously published writings include The Mother of Us All (1947), an opera based on the life of Susan B. Anthony, again with music by Virgil Thomson; Last Operas and Plays (1949); and Two and Other Early Portraits (1951).

For years, the Stein-Toklas home in Paris was the centre of an important literary group, where American writers such as Sherwood Anderson, Ernest Hemingway, and Thornton Wilder were encouraged by Stein in the development of their own literary styles. Stein was one of the earliest patrons of early 20th-century painting, beginning with the Cubist movement. She and her brother were among the first collectors of works by the Cubists and other experimental painters such as Picasso, Matisse, and Braque, who also became her friends. Through her writings and representative personal collection of innovative contemporary works, she was instrumental in bringing modern art to the attention of a wide international circle.

Stein died in Paris on July 27, 1946. Her papers were bequeathed to Yale University; her art collection, however, became the subject of years of litigation by her family, eventually being dispersed in several US collections.