Stein, Gertrude 1874-1946
US writer

She was born in Allegheny, Pennsylvania, and spent her early years in Vienna, Paris and San Francisco. She then studied psychology at Radcliffe College under William James, and medicine at Johns Hopkins University. She then settled in Paris, where she was absorbed into the world of experimental art and letters and came into contact with writers and artists including Picasso and Matisse. From 1907 she shared an apartment with a close friend from San Francisco, Alice B Toklas. Stein sometimes attempted to apply the theories of abstract painting to her own writing, which led to a magnified reputation for obscurity and meaningless repetition. However, her first book, Three Lives (1908), reveals a sensitive ear for speech rhythms, and by far the larger part of her work is immediately comprehensible. The prose of Tender Buttons (1914) is repetitive, canonic and extremely musical. The Making of Americans (1925) is a vast, virtually unreadable family saga, but she took a more ironic stance in the playfully titled The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933) and Everybody's Autobiography (1937). Four Saints in Three Acts (1934) and The Mother Of Us All (1947) were operas with music by Virgil Thomson.

Bibliography: J Hobhouse, Everybody Who Was Anybody: a biography of Gertrude Stein (1975)