“You are all a lost generation.”

–GERTRUDE STEIN in conversation

Gertrude Stein was the pillar of the avant garde movement in early 20th century Paris.
Born on February 3, 1874 in Pennsylvania, Stein was brought up in Vienna and Paris and exposed to three languages and various European cultures before her family settled in Oakland, California. Though she was often an unmotivated student at school, Stein read Shakespeare, Wordsworth, and many other writers from a young age. When she was 18, she studied under famed psychologist William James at Harvard, and though she subsequently enrolled in medical school, she eventually quit and decided to become a writer.

In 1903, she went to France with her brother where the two of them began an art
collection that would become world renowned. Among their paintings were works such as Pablo Picasso’s Young Girl With a Flower Basket and Henri Matisse’s Woman With A Hat. With a confident personality and commanding presence, Stein quickly became a patron of the arts, leading weekly salons in her home that were frequented by such writers and artists as Picasso, Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, Matisse, Ezra Pound, and F. Scott Fitzgerald.

While in Paris, Stein met another expatriate, Alice B. Toklas, who would not only become her life partner, but also the voice Stein would use to write one of her later, most accessible and famous works, The Autobiography of Alice B. Tolkas (1933)—a nonfiction book that expounds Stein’s experiences in Paris during the interwar period through the eyes of Toklas.

Although she is often better remembered today for her secondary role as influencer and patron of the avant-garde, Stein was a prolific author who responded to 19th century literature by writing experimental novels, plays, libretti, stories, and poetry. Her writing was often an expression of the abstract work done by such painters like Picasso. Her book Tender Buttons (1914) is a book of prose poems describing ordinary objects in abstract and unfamiliar ways. In one excerpt, “A Light in the Moon,” she begins, “A light in the moon the only light is on Sunday,” and concludes with: “The care with which there is incredible justice and likeness, all this makes a magnificent asparagus, and also a fountain.” Through her subversion of language and of the expectations of what literature can be, Stein helped define modernism and redefine what poetry could be.

She died on July 27th, 1946 in France.