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
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Wyndham Lewis
He examines the work of Gertrude Stein (whom he counsels to get out of english) and popular writer Anita Loos (Gentlemen Prefer Blondes), as well as Bergson , Einstein , Pound , Joyce , and others.
Oldsey, Bernard Stanley, editor. Dictionary of Literary Biography 15. Gale Research.
313
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Jeanette Winterson
In these essays JW defends the power and importance of art, and the necessity of difficult art, discusses the works of Virginia Woolf , T. S. Eliot , and Gertrude Stein , and explores her...
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.
114
LR sets out to free the poet from the restrictions imposed by the synthetic or collective notion...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Laura Riding
14A, designed to make money (primarily for Ellidge) is a fictionalization, farcical rather than tragic, of the events around Riding's suicide attempt. Actual people are portrayed with satirical gusto: for instance, Amelia, whose identity...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Laura Riding
The wide range of topics discussed includes aspects of language and literature, the harmful effects of structuralism and other science-inspired approaches to language, what Riding takes to be the special active unselfishness of women, issues...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Natalie Clifford Barney
The first half, devoted to men, describes NCB 's encounters with Oscar Wilde , Anatole France , Remy de Gourmont , Marcel Proust , Gabriele D'Annunzio , Max Jacob , and others. The second part...
Textual Production H. D.
During 1927-33 HD contributed to the avant-garde, influential film magazine Close Up: Devoted to the Art of Films, which Bryher funded and of which Kenneth Macpherson was the official editor. It had a temperate...
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
Textual Production Edith Sitwell
John Lehmann and Derek Parker had published an earlier collection with the same title in 1970, but it was less valuable than it could have been because Edith's surviving brother, Sacheverell, decreed that all family...
Textual Production Bryher
As editors, Bryher and Kenneth Macpherson ensured Close Up's international, interdisciplinary emphases by publishing works by and on Sergei Eisenstein , G. W. Pabst , H. D. , Dorothy Richardson , Gertrude Stein , and Man Ray .
Marek, Jayne E. Women Editing Modernism: "Little" Magazines & Literary History. University Press of Kentucky.
118-20
Textual Production Mina Loy
ML delivered an informal lecture on Gertrude Stein at Natalie Barney 's Académie des femmes.
Loy, Mina. “Introduction and Time-Table”. The Last Lunar Baedeker, edited by Roger L. Conover, Carcanet, p. xv - lxxix.
lxxiii
Textual Production Natalie Clifford Barney
NCB wrote a preface for Gertrude Stein 's As Fine as Melanctha, which was published later that year, eight years after Stein's death.
OCLC WorldCat. http://www.oclc.org/firstsearch/content/worldcat/. Accessed 1999.
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.
94
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.
37
One year into high school she began...

Timeline

1925: The Black US singer Josephine Baker, aged...

Building item

1925

The Black US singer Josephine Baker , aged nineteen, met with phenomenal success in Paris; she was seen as exemplifying the Jazz Age on one hand and a new racial consciousness on the other.

Texts

Stein, Gertrude, and Carl Van Vechten. A Novel of Thank You. Yale University Press, 1958.
Stein, Gertrude. “A Stein Song”. Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein, edited by Carl Van Vechten, Random House, 1946, p. ix - xv.
Stein, Gertrude. Before the Flowers of Friendship Faded Friendship Faded. Plain Edition, 1931.
Stein, Gertrude. Brewsie and Willie. Random House, 1946.
Stein, Gertrude. Composition as Explanation. Hogarth Press, 1926.
Stein, Gertrude. Everybody’s Autobiography. Random House, 1937.
Stein, Gertrude, and Leon Katz. Fernhurst, Q.E.D., and Other Early Writings. Liveright, 1971.
Barney, Natalie Clifford, and Gertrude Stein. “Foreword”. As Fine as Melanctha, Yale University Press, 1954, p. vii - xix.
Stein, Gertrude et al. Four Saints in Three Acts. Random House, 1934.
Stein, Gertrude, and Sherwood Anderson. Geography and Plays. Four Seas Press, 1922.
Stein, Gertrude. “How Many Acts Are There In It?”. Last Operas and Plays, edited by Carl Van Vechten, Rinehart, 1949, p. vii - xix.
Stein, Gertrude. Ida. Random House, 1941.
Stein, Gertrude. Last Operas and Plays. Editor Van Vechten, Carl, Rinehart, 1949.
Stein, Gertrude, and Elizabeth Sprigge. Look at Me Now and Here I Am: Writings and Lectures: 1909-1945. Editor Meyerowitz, Patricia, Penguin, 1971.
Stein, Gertrude. Matisse Picasso and Gertrude Stein. Plain Edition, 1933.
Stein, Gertrude. Matisse, Picasso, and Gertrude Stein. Something Else Press, 1972.
Stein, Gertrude, and Leon Solomons. “Normal Motor Automatism”. Harvard Psychological Review, Harvard University Press.
Stein, Gertrude. Paris France. Scribner, 1940.
Stein, Gertrude. Picasso. Floury, 1938.
Stein, Gertrude. Portraits and Prayers. Random House, 1934.
Stein, Gertrude. Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein. Editor Van Vechten, Carl, Random House, 1946.
Stein, Gertrude, and Donald Sutherland. Stanzas in Meditation. Yale University Press, 1956.
Stein, Gertrude. Tender Buttons. Claire Marie, 1914.
Stein, Gertrude. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. Harcourt, Brace, 1933.
Stein, Gertrude. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. Vintage Books, 1990.