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
Textual Features Edith Sitwell
The English edition appeared the following year. Her choice for inclusion is, as usual, idiosyncratic. She begins well before Chaucer , with anonymous early religious poems in which may be heard, she writes, the creaking...
Textual Features Stevie Smith
This highly unusual novel takes the form of a disconnected journal by a publisher's secretary named Pompey, an alienated but irrepressible member of the disregarded female work-force, who is clearly an alter-ego for SS ...
Textual Features Wyndham Lewis
Another essay, The Dumb Ox, criticizes Hemingway , in part by stressing his debt to Gertrude Stein : This brilliant Jewish lady has made a clown of him by teaching Ernest Hemingway her baby-talk...
Textual Features Fleur Adcock
She relates how in reading for the anthology she made discoveries and underwent conversions—one result of which had to be the jettisoning of some early choices whose phantoms later, for her, haunted the volume...
Textual Features Anne Carson
Like Nox, this text challenges normal book structure by consisting of a box containing twelve separate booklets, which can therefore be read in any order. Their material embraces a range of periods, settings, and...
Textual Features Laura Riding
The preface to Poems: A Joking Word explains the title like this. Poems means jokingly the surprisingness of doom. Poems is a joking word to say that doom is surprising enough for there to be...
Textual Features Carol Ann Duffy
Among the many poets gathered here, inescapable choices like Wilfred Owen , Siegfried Sassoon , Isaac Rosenberg , and Robert Graves rub shoulders with the unexpected, like Cynthia Asquith , Sarojini Naidu , and Gertrude Stein .
Textual Features Natalie Clifford Barney
Less intimate than Souvenirs indiscrets, this volume includes sketches of Gertrude Stein , Jean Cocteau , Gide , D'Annunzio , and Rabindranath Tagore . One piece, written in response to Ramon Gomez de la Serna
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, pp. xvii - xxxi; 1.
xxi-xxii
“Dictionary of Literary Biography online”. Gale Databases: Literature Resource Center-LRC.
4
Residence Laura Riding
After a visit to Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas in the French Alps, LR and Robert Graves arrived on the island of Mallorca, where they settled in the village of Deyá in a...
Reception Sylvia Beach
Le Mercure de France published its homage to SB , with essays and poems by T. S. Eliot , Janet Flanner , André Gide , James Joyce , Gertrude Stein and others.
Mathews, Jackson, and Maurice Saillet. Sylvia Beach 1887-1962. Mercure de France.
cover and prelims
Reception Rhoda Broughton
In a lamentable
Lowndes, Marie Belloc. Diaries and Letters of Marie Belloc Lowndes, 1911-1947. Editor Marques, Susan Lowndes, Chatto and Windus.
217
article on the death of Virginia Woolf , Hugh Walpole accused literary ladies of acting like priestesses engaged in throwing fragrant incense on their own altars. The first name he mentions...
Publishing Wyndham Lewis
WL privately published The Apes of God, a satire attacking several writers of the 1920s, including Gertrude Stein , the Bloomsbury Group, and the Osbert SitwellSitwell s.
Oldsey, Bernard Stanley, editor. Dictionary of Literary Biography 15. Gale Research.
314
Parker, Peter, editor. A Reader’s Guide to Twentieth-Century Writers. Oxford University Press.
Publishing Sylvia Beach
Rather than being a historical opus about life in the heyday of Paris, this is an engaging mixture filled with sketchy and witty recollections. When William Bradley and Alfred Knopf approached SB more than...
Publishing Mina Loy
The transatlantic review published the first section of ML 's letter about the writings of Gertrude Stein .
Loy, Mina. “Introduction and Notes”. The Lost Lunar Baedeker, edited by Roger L. Conover, Farrar, Straus, Giroux.
231

Timeline

No timeline events available.

Texts

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.