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...
Friends, Associates Julia Constance Fletcher
In 1911, when she was nearly sixty, JCF stayed with Mabel Dodge at the Villa Curonia in Florence, and there met Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas . Stein described her as a very...
Intertextuality and Influence Anne Carson
AC 's starting-point is the poem about Geryon by the Greek lyric poet Stesichoros or Stesichorus, whose surviving writings are so gnomic and fragmentary that every statement about them remains hesitant and uncertain. Stesichoros is...
Intertextuality and Influence Edith Sitwell
ES loved Christina Rossetti from her childhood, and later thoroughly admired Gertrude Stein . As a young woman, however, she believed: Women's poetry, with the exception of Sappho . . . and Goblin MarketChristina Rossetti and...
Intertextuality and Influence Natalie Clifford Barney
At the beginning of the preface, NCB explains that she has not yet received the manuscript, so she will talk instead about my personal experience and points of contact and discord with this author, whose...
Leisure and Society Leonora Carrington
The street in which LC and Ernst lived was also occupied by such authors as Gertrude Stein and Natalie Barney at various times in the early twentieth century.
Literary responses Julia Constance Fletcher
Gertrude Stein says this play was very successful, but she also says it had a long run in London, which seems to be a mistake.
Stein, Gertrude. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. Vintage Books, 1990.
131
Literary responses Marie Belloc Lowndes
Particular admirers of her work included Gertrude Stein , who recommended her to Ernest Hemingway .
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.
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
Literary responses Christine Brooke-Rose
CBR held Guest Chairs at SUNY at Buffalo (1974), New York University (1976), the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (1979), and Brandeis University (1980).
Birch, Sarah. Christine Brooke-Rose and Contemporary Fiction. Clarendon Press, 1994.
228
Her own summary of her career, however, was that she tried...
Literary responses Marie Belloc Lowndes
Child wrote that this was a murder story but no mere murder story because MBL had chosen not to set the reader a puzzle but to probe the detail of characters whose guilt was already...
Literary responses Marie Belloc Lowndes
This was one of the two books by MBL which was recommended to Ernest Hemingway by Gertrude Stein . (He too thought it was about Jack the Ripper.)
Lowndes, Marie Belloc. Diaries and Letters of Marie Belloc Lowndes, 1911-1947. Editor Marques, Susan Lowndes, Chatto and Windus, 1971.
98
Susan Tweedsmuir later wrote of the...
Occupation Ford Madox Ford
Ernest Hemingway was associate editor. The magazine published modernist writers including Djuna Barnes , Jean Rhys , Gertrude Stein , William Carlos Williams , Ezra Pound , and e. e. cummings .
Stang, Sondra J., editor. “Introduction and Editorial Materials”. The Ford Madox Ford Reader, Carcanet, 1986, p. various pages.
200
Occupation Sylvia Beach
This was the first American bookstore in Paris. It became a focal point of French and American literary activities. In the summer of 1921 the bookstore moved to 12 rue de l'Odéon.
Beach, Sylvia. Shakespeare and Company. Harcourt, Brace, 1959.
60
For...
Occupation Virginia Woolf
The Press, which began as therapy and for the purpose of publishing the works of its owners, grew into a major engine of modern culture and thought.
Lee, Hermione. Virginia Woolf. Chatto and Windus, 1996.
371-3
Its political interests were served by enlightened...

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.