Gertrude Stein

American · 1874 to 1946

Born on February 3, 1874, in Allegheny, Pennsylvania, now part of Pittsburgh, the youngest of five surviving children of German Jewish parents who had made a fortune in textiles and streetcar lines, she was raised in Vienna, Paris, and finally Oakland, California, where her father became director of the Market Street Railway. Her mother died when she was fourteen, her father three years later. She studied psychology under William James at Radcliffe, conducted experiments in automatic writing, and entered Johns Hopkins Medical School, leaving without a degree. In 1903 she moved to Paris and into the apartment at 27 rue de Fleurus that she and her brother Leo would fill with the Cézannes, Matisses, and early Picassos they bought before anyone else wanted them. Her Saturday salons drew Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Sherwood Anderson, and Picasso, who painted her famous portrait in 1906 over more than eighty sittings. Alice B. Toklas arrived from San Francisco in 1907 and became her partner, secretary, cook, and conscience for the next thirty-nine years. Three Lives (1909) appeared at her own expense, then Tender Buttons (1914), prose-poem still lifes of objects, food, and rooms in a syntax of repetition and recursion that influenced everyone who came after. The Making of Americans (1925) ran to nearly a thousand pages. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933), written in Toklas's voice about her own life, made her a bestseller at fifty-nine. The two women survived the Nazi occupation in rural France through the protection of the Vichy official Bernard Faÿ. She died of stomach cancer in Neuilly-sur-Seine on July 27, 1946, at seventy-two.