Gertrude Stein

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Standard Name: Stein, Gertrude
Birth Name: Gertrude Stein
Nickname: Altrude
Nickname: Sybil of Montparnasse
Gertrude Stein concerned herself with problems of identity, knowledge, consciousness, and language. In a period of modernist experiment, she became famous as a radically innovative avant-gardist. Her experimental imagination played around with the generic requirements of many forms—short stories, detective stories, novellas, literary portraits, poems, autobiographies, critical essays, operas, plays, and war reminiscences. This often non-referential work is opaque and resistant to interpretation. An expatriate for virtually all of her writing career and of the first half of the twentieth century, living largely in Paris (though in French villages during the Second World War), she marked her writing as deeply American. In the years between the wars she hosted her legendary salon at 27 rue de Fleurus, where, after 1910, she lived with her life partner, Alice B. Toklas . With her brother Leo , Stein was an early collector and promoter of modern, especially cubist, painting.
Black and white photo of Gertude Stein taken by Carl Van Vechten in early 1935. She is standing in front of an American flag, wearing a dark jacket and pale scarf.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Friends, Associates Laura Riding
Graves and Riding were touchy as friends, between their sense of literary mission (they saw Graves's biography of T. E. Lawrence as a somewhat demeaning potboiler, not part of his real work at all) and...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Laura Riding
Although this volume appeared later, its second chapter was the root of the concluding chapter of A Survey of Modernist Poetry. Gertrude Stein is a test case here: T. S. Eliot is hauled over...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Laura Riding
The volume was, says Elizabeth Friedmann , largely a response to the ideas of Wyndham Lewis .
Friedmann, Elizabeth. A Mannered Grace. Persea Books, 2005.
114
LR sets out to free the poet from the restrictions imposed by the synthetic or collective notion...
Literary responses Laura Riding
Gertrude Stein , to whom she sent a copy, responded, the poetry is good poetry.
qtd. in
Friedmann, Elizabeth. A Mannered Grace. Persea Books, 2005.
122
Publishing Laura Riding
LR published poems, essays, and a review in 1927-8 in transition, the little magazine produced in Paris by Eugene and Maria Jolas and Elliot Paul . Her critical essay here on Gertrude Stein was...
Textual Production Dorothy Richardson
In her correspondence Richardson addresses a great range of topics, including her own varied reading. She comments on women writers from Julian of Norwich through Jane Austen , Emily and Charlotte Brontë , George Eliot
Residence Ezra Pound
EP lived in Paris, where he formed associations with many other expatriate writers including Gertrude Stein , Ernest Hemingway , and Natalie Barney .
Nadel, Ira Bruce, editor. “Chronology; Introduction”. The Cambridge Companion to Ezra Pound, Cambridge University Press, 1999, pp. xvii - xxxi; 1.
xxi-xxii
“Dictionary of Literary Biography online”. Gale Databases: Literature Resource Center-LRC.
4
Textual Production Tillie Olsen
By the time she entered high school she was keeping a journal in assorted and undated notebooks containing poems, bits of stories, drafts of letters, and reflections.
Reid, Panthea. Tillie Olsen: One Woman, Many Riddles. Rutgers University Press, 2010.
37
One year into high school she began...
Publishing Tillie Olsen
Tillie Lerner, later TO , was nineteen when she began drafting a novel, and writing it was an element in her life for thirty years. In 1934 Bennett Cerf and Donald Klopfer , founders of...
Friends, Associates Lady Ottoline Morrell
Her tour of the city with Chadbourne included the studios of Matisse and Picasso (in Montmartre), and Gertrude 's and Leo Stein 's collection of contemporary paintings.
Seymour, Miranda. Ottoline Morrell: Life on the Grand Scale. Farrar Straus Giroux, 1992.
88
Friends, Associates Hope Mirrlees
While living in Paris, Mirrlees and Harrison entertained visitors who included HM 's mother (widowed in 1924), and Virginia and Leonard Woolf .
Robinson, Annabel. The Life and Work of Jane Ellen Harrison. Oxford University Press, 2001.
298
The two women were acquainted with Edith Wharton , Dorothy (Strachey)
Education Carson McCullers
About this time she was reading voraciously: theBrontësisters , Russian novelists and dramatists, and British and American modernists including Katherine Mansfield and Gertrude Stein . Isak Dinesen was to come later.
Carr, Virginia Spencer. The Lonely Hunter: A Biography of Carson McCullers. Doubleday and Co. Inc., 1975.
33
Dews, Carlos L., and Carson McCullers. “Chronology and Notes”. Complete Novels, Library of America, Literary Classics of the United States, 2001, pp. 807-27.
808
Friends, Associates Mina Loy
ML first met Leo and Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas at Mabel Dodge 's Florence salon. Mina's and Gertrude's friendship continued for many years, and Mina wrote and spoke about Stein's writing in the 1920s...
Friends, Associates Mina Loy
ML was now at the centre of the Parisian expatriate literary community, and she renewed her friendships with Gertrude Stein and Djuna Barnes .
Burke, Carolyn. Becoming Modern: The Life of Mina Loy. Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1996.
328
In 1927 she spoke at Natalie Barney 's Académie des Femmes
Textual Production Mina Loy
The letter included as its epigraph ML 's poem about Stein in which she calls her Curie / of the laboratory / of vocabulary.
Loy, Mina. The Lost Lunar Baedeker. Editor Conover, Roger L., Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1996.
94

Timeline

No timeline events available.

Texts

Stein, Gertrude. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. Vintage Books, 1990.
Stein, Gertrude. The Geographical History of America. Random House, 1936.
Stein, Gertrude. The Geographical History of America. University Microfilms, 1969.
Stein, Gertrude. The Making of Americans. Contact Editions, 1925.
Stein, Gertrude et al. The Making of Americans. Dalkey Archive Press, 1995.
Stein, Gertrude et al. The Mother of Us All. Music Press, 1947.
Stein, Gertrude, and Clement Hurd. The World is Round. W. R. Scott, 1939.
Stein, Gertrude. Things As They Are. Banyan Press, 1950.
Stein, Gertrude. Three Lives. Grafton Press, 1909.
Stein, Gertrude, and Janet Flanner. Two: Gertrude Stein and Her Brother. Yale University Press, 1951.
Stein, Gertrude. Wars I Have Seen. Random House, 1945.
Stein, Gertrude et al. Writings 1903-1932. Library of America, 1998.
Stein, Gertrude et al. Writings 1932-1948. Library of America, 1998.