Gertrude Stein

Photograph by Carl Van Vechten, 1935.

Courtesy of the Library of Congress (LC-USZ62-103680).

Stein, Gertrude (03 February 1874–27 July 1946), author, was born in Allegheny, Pennsylvania, the daughter of Daniel Stein, a businessman, and Amelia Keyser. Stein spent her early years in Europe, where her parents were traveling; the family returned to America in 1879, settling the following year in Oakland, California, where Stein spent the rest of her youth. Of Oakland she was later to remark, “There is no there there.” She countered the bland, suburban surroundings by reading voraciously: Shakespeare, Scott, Richardson, Fielding, Wordsworth.

After her parents had died, her mother in 1888 and her father in 1891, Stein’s eldest brother, Michael, moved his siblings to San Francisco, where he had been directing a street railway company. Soon afterward, with her brother Leo and sister Bertha, Stein moved to Baltimore to live with an aunt. Leo Stein then decided to register at Harvard, and Gertrude followed, attending the Harvard Annex, precursor to Radcliffe College. She studied with William James, George Santayana, Josiah Royce, and Hugo Münsterberg, among others, and later cited James as the most significant influence of her college years. In 1897 she entered the Johns Hopkins University Medical School but quickly discovered that she was not enthusiastic about pursuing a career as a physician. Nevertheless, some of her experiences while studying medicine are reflected in her stories, most notably “Melanctha,” in Three Lives (written 1905–1906).

Beginning in 1900, Gertrude and Leo Stein summered together in Europe. Leo decided to take up residence there, first in London (1902) and then in Paris (1903). Gertrude joined him in his flat at 27 rue de Fleurus, in the Montparnasse district of the city.

Although the Steins’ expatriation was not unusual at the time—many artists, writers, and intellectuals found a more hospitable environment in Europe than in the United States—Gertrude sought in Paris a liberation from the strictures of American society that made her feel like an outcast. Her occasional writings during her undergraduate years reveal a troubled and depressed young woman, unable to envision herself fitting into such prescribed roles as wife and mother. Her “red deeps,” as she termed her tumultuous feelings, became exacerbated at Johns Hopkins, where her acknowledged love for another woman was not reciprocated. This affair made its way into her first extended piece of fiction, Things As They Are (1903), which was published posthumously.

Stein’s reputation as an avant-garde writer is based largely on her difficult, experimental, hermetic works, pieces that have been collected in eight volumes published by Yale University Press and in several other collections. Her large output, however, is not exclusively devoted to literary experimentation, but rather falls into four general categories: early autobiographical pieces, such as The Making of Americans(begun 1903, completed 1911) and Things As They Are, in which she focuses on difficult passages in her life; literary experiments—poetry, drama, and prose—in which she attempts to revive the meaning of words stripped of their cultural and emotional connotations; hermetic autobiographical pieces focusing on her relationship with Alice B. Toklas and their circle of friends and acquaintances; and memoirs, such as The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933) and Everybody’s Autobiography (1937), written for a popular audience. Stein also published explanatory essays, such as “Composition as Explanation” and “What Are Masterpieces and Why Are There So Few of Them,” many of which first were delivered as lectures at Oxford in 1926, and during an American tour in 1934–1935.

Stein’s reputation as a cultural figure comes less from her writing than from her brilliant circle of friends. In the early 1900s, her brother Leo, with the advice of his friend Bernard Berenson and the art dealer Ambroise Vollard, began collecting art, including the work of Cézanne, Renoir, Daumier, Manet, Gauguin, Derain, Rousseau, and Matisse. The Steins’ home became a meeting place for many accomplished and aspiring artists as well as writers, musicians, and a smattering of rich expatriates. Although when she first arrived in Europe, Stein was dominated by her outspoken brother, later, after Leo moved to Florence and Alice B. Toklas became Stein’s companion, she became the center of one of the most important salons in Paris. She nurtured an intense relationship with Pablo Picasso, commemorated in his 1906 portrait of her, now at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. Among her other enthusiasms were F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sherwood Anderson, Thornton Wilder, Ernest Hemingway, Carl Van Vechten, the composer Virgil Thomson, and British painter Francis Rose. Her friendship with Hemingway was thwarted by Toklas’s jealousy, as was her friendship with the heiress and literary impresario Mabel Dodge Luhan, who was instrumental in the early publication of Stein’s work.

Stein and Toklas remained in their country home in Bilignin during World War II, despite their friends’ urging that they flee to Switzerland for safety. After the war, they returned to Paris, where they were hosts to scores of young GIs who came to pay homage to Gertrude Stein, the literary legend. In the spring of 1946, Stein suddenly became ill; cancer was diagnosed and an emergency operation performed. She died in Paris.

Throughout her career, Stein flamboyantly denied her need for an audience. “I write for myself and strangers,” she once commented, quickly modifying the statement to “I write for myself.” “Reading Gertrude Stein at length,” wrote Richard Bridgman, a patient scholar and one of her most astute critics, “is not unlike making one’s way through an interminable and badly printed game book.” Later readers have tended to agree, and Stein has been the subject of merciless parodies. The Beinecke Library at Yale, where her papers are housed, has collected, for example, a large number of humorous plays on Stein’s famous, enigmatic remark: “Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose.”

Privately, however, Stein longed for a readership that would acknowledge her contribution to modern literature. At times, her only sympathetic reader was Alice Toklas. She has been taken most seriously long after her death, when critics and scholars have applied feminist, structuralist, or deconstructionist theories in an attempt to explain, justify, or decode Stein’s difficult works. It is important, in weighing these studies, to remember that Stein attempted not one experiment, but many and that the motivations for her hermetic writings—sometimes to veil her lesbian relationship with Toklas, sometimes to translate into prose the kind of experiments her colleagues were carrying out in art, sometimes to challenge her readers’ preconceptions about language and narrative—do not make any single explanation viable for all of her works.