Gertrude Stein

At 72 years old, Gertrude Stein has this physical status:

Gertrude Stein (February 3, 1874 – July 27, 1946) was an American novelist, poet, playwright, and art dealer.

Stein, who was born in Pittsburgh, California, and lived in France for the remainder of her life.

She held a Paris salon where modernism in literature and art, including Pablo Picasso, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound, Sherwood Anderson, and Henri Matisse, would all be present.

The book was a literary bestseller and propelled Stein from the obscurity of the cult-literature scene to mainstream interest.

"Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose" and "there is no place there is," two quotes from her books have made; the former is often a remark on her childhood home of Oakland. Q.E.D. is one of her books. (1903), The Making of Americans, a lesbian romance involving several of Stein's family members, Fernhurst, a fictional tale about a love triangle.

Stein wrote about lesbian sexuality in Tender Buttons (1914).

Stein, a Jew residing in Nazi-occupied France, may only have been able to prolong her lifestyle as an art collector and also ensure her physical stability by the care of Vichy government official and Nazi collaborator Bernard Faucon.

Stein expressed admiration for another Nazi collaborator, Vichy leader Marshal Pétain, after the war came to an end.

Early life

Daniel Stein and Amelia (née Keyser) Stein, the youngest of a family of five children, was born in Allegheny, Pennsylvania (which joined Pittsburgh in 1907) to a Jewish family of upper-middle-class Jewish parents. Her father, a wealthy businessman with real estate interests, was a successful businessman. In their home, German and English were spoken. Michael (1865), Simon (1868), Bertha (1870), and Leo (1872) were among Gertrude's siblings.

Stein and her family moved to Vienna and then Paris when she was three years old. The Steins, aided by governoresses and tutors, have attempted to imbue their children with European history and life. They returned to America in 1878, settling in Oakland, California, where her father, the Market Street Railway, was director of San Francisco's streetcar lines, after a yearlong absence. Stein attended the Sabbath Congregation in Oakland, California. They lived on a ten-acre lot in Oakland for four years, and Stein maintained many memories of California. She would often go on vacations with her brother, Leo, with whom she had a close friendship. Stein found formal education in Oakland unpleasant, but she did read Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Scott, Burns, Smollett, Fielding, and others.

When Stein was 14 years old, she died. Her father died three years later. Michael Stein, Stein's eldest brother, died while transferring his four children to San Francisco, where he now worked as a director of the Market Street Cable Railway Company, and in 1892, Stein and another sister, Bertha, were arranged for them to live with their mother's family in Baltimore. Here she lived with her uncle, David Bachrach, who in 1877 married Fanny Keyser, Gertrude's maternal aunt.

Stein met Claribel and Etta Cone, who held Saturday evening salons that she would later imitate in Paris. In her friendship with Alice B. Toklas, the Cones expressed an appreciation for art and discussion about it, as well as modeled a domestic division of labor that Stein would imitate in her marriage.

Education

Stein attended Radcliffe College, then a Harvard University annexation from 1893 to 1897, and was a student of psychologist William James. Stein and another student, Leon Mendez Solomons, conducted experiments on normal motor automatism, a phenomenon that is unlikely to occur in people as a result of two seemingly contradictory human activities such as writing and speaking.

These studies produced examples of writing that seemed to represent "stream of consciousness," a psychological term often attributed to James and the style of modernist authors Virginia Woolf and James Joyce. Behavior scientist B. F. Skinner interpreted Stein's difficult poem Tender Buttons as an example of normal motor automatism in 1934. In a letter written in the 1930s, Stein explained that she had never accepted automatic writing: "[T]here can be automatic movements, but not automatic writing." Writing for the common individual is just too difficult for an activity to be indulged in automatically." When she was at Radcliffe, she did write an article on "sponsible automatic writing," but "the unconscious and intuition" weren't concerned her.

At Radcliffe, she began a lifelong friendship with Mabel Foote Weeks, whose correspondence traces a significant portion of Stein's life. Stein spent the summer at Woods Hole, Massachusetts, studying embryology at the Marine Biological Laboratory in 1897. She obtained her A.B. (Bachelor of Arts) magna cum lauded Radcliffe in 1898.

William James, who had been a dedicated mentor to Stein at Radcliffe and naming her as her "most gifted woman student," encouraged Stein to enroll in medical school. Despite the fact that Stein professed no expertise in either the theory or practice of medicine, she enrolled in Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in 1897. Stein skipped an important course, lost enthusiasm, and left in her fourth year. Ultimately, medical school had bored her, and she had spent many of her evenings not dedicated to her studies, but she enjoyed long walks and attending the opera.

Stein's time at Johns Hopkins was marred by challenges and adversity. Men ruled the medical field, and the inclusion of women in the field was not unreserved or universally accepted. Stein often described herself as a depressed young woman living with a paternalistic tradition, struggling to find her own identity, which she discovered did not fit into the traditional female role. Her unethical physical appearance and eccentric style of dressing provoked a remark, and she was described as "Big and floppy and sandaled without bothering a single bit." Stein's "controversial position on women's medicine caused issues with the male faculty," according to Linda Wagner-Martin, who eventually left without finishing her degree.

Stein gave a controversial talk titled "The Value of College Education for Women," seemingly intended to compel the predominantly middle-class audience.

In the lecture Stein maintained:

Stein, who was still curious about sexual problems and uninhibitedly unaware of her latent sexuality, had an awakening. She became infatuated with Mary Bookstaver, who was involved in an 1899 or 1900 friendship with Mabel Haynes, a medical student. Asher "erotic awakening" she was witnessing, the two women's friendship served for Stein. Stein was reportedly demoralized by the tumultuous love triangle, which led to her decision to abandon her medical studies. Leo Stein, Stein's brother, left for London in 1902, and Stein followed him. The two artists migrated to Paris, where Leo Leo intended to pursue an art career.

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Literary career

Stein began submitting her writing for publication while living in Paris. Her earliest writings were mainly retellings of her college experiences. Three Lives is her first critically acclaimed book. Mildred Aldrich introduced Stein to Mabel Dodge Luhan in 1911, sparking a short-lived but fruitful friendship in which the wealthy Mabel Dodge promoted Gertrude's fame in the United States.

Mabel was raving about Stein's sprawling magazine The Makings of Americans, and the company, although Stein had a difficult time selling her writing to publishers, has privately released 300 copies of Portrait of Mabel Dodge at Villa Curonia. Dodge was also involved in the preparation and promotion of the 69th Regiment Armory Exhibition in 1913, "America's first avant-garde art exhibition."

In addition,, she wrote the first critical appraisal of Stein's writing to appear in America in "Speculations, or Post-Impressionists in Prose," a special edition of Arts and Decoration published in March 1913. Dodge wrote "Speculations" about Stein's later critical reception: "Speculations" foreshadowed Stein's later critical reception.

In 1913, Stein and Carl Van Vechten, the celebrated critic and photographer, became friends in Paris. The two became lifelong colleagues, inventing pet names for each other: Van Vechten was "Papa Woojums" and Stein, "Baby Woojums." Van Vechten was a zealous promoter of Stein's literary work in the United States, effectively becoming her American agent.

After a 30-year absence, Stein arrived in America in October 1934. She was greeted by a throng of journalists in New York after being disembarking from the ocean liner. In nearly every New York City newspaper, front-page columns on Stein appeared. She was able to get a glimpse of the publicity that would be central to her US tour as she rode through Manhattan to her hotel. "Gertrude Stein Has Arrived," a electric sign in Times Square told all that "Gertrude Stein Has Arrived." Her six-month tour of the country involved 191 days of travel, criss-crossing 23 states and visiting 37 cities. Stein prepared her talks for every stop-over in a systematic manner, and each venue was limited to five hundred people. She spoke from notes and set the stage for an audience question and answer period at the end of her presentation.

Stein's popularity as a lecture speaker has received mixed feedback. Some said at the time that "Stein's followers by and large did not know her lectures." Some members of the psychiatric community weighed in, finding that Stein suffered from a speech disorder called palilalia, which caused her "to stutter over words and phrases." Stein, on the other hand, was a perceptive presence, with a captivating personality that could seduce listeners with the "musicality of her words."

Eleanor Roosevelt, the President's wife, was invited to tea in Washington, D.C. Stein. She visited actor and filmmaker Charlie Chaplin, who allegedly discussed the future of cinema with her in Beverly Hills, California. Stein left America in May 1935 as a young American celebrity with a pledge from Random House, who had agreed to be the American publisher for all of her future projects. After Stein's return to Paris, the Chicago Daily Tribune wrote, "No writer in years has been so widely discussed, so much caricatured, so passionately defended."

On October 24, 1903, Stein published Q.E.D., her first book. It is one of the oldest coming out stories, about a love affair involving Stein and her companions Mabel Haynes, Grace Lounsbury, and Mary Bookstaver, and occurred in Baltimore between 1897 and 1901.

Stein wrote Fernhurst, a fictional account of a dramatic three-person romantic relationship involving a dean (M. Carey Thomas), a faculty member from Bryn Mawr College (Mary Gwinn), and a Harvard undergraduate (Alfred Hodder). Fernhurst "is a decidedly minor and awkward piece of writing," Mellow writes. It includes some remarks by Gertrude in her autobiography as she addressed the "fateful twentieth year" during which:

Mellow claims that she was able to "certainly determine" that the'small hard truth' of her life would be writing in 1904.

Stein attributed the start of Three Lives to the inspiration she received from a portrait Cézanne had painted of his wife, which was part of his Stein collection. She characterized this as a turning point in her writing style evolution.

Stein described:

She began Three Lives in 1905 in the spring and finished the year the following year.

The Making of Americans was published in 1906–1908. Gertrude Stein's date for writing The Making of Americans was 1906–1908. Her biographer has discovered evidence that it originated in 1902 and did not come to an end until 1911. Stein compared her work to James Joyce's Ulysses and Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time. Her analysts were less enthusiastic about it. Stein wrote the majority of the novel between 1903 and 1911, and evidence from her manuscripts indicates three major periods of revision during that time. The manuscript remained largely hidden from public view until 1924, when Ford Madox Ford decided to publish excerpts from the transatlantic study, which was urging Ernest Hemingway. The Paris-based Contact Press published a limited run of 500 copies of the novel in 1925. Harcourt Brace published a much-abridged version in 1934, but the full version did not appear in print until Something Else Press republished it in 1966. Dalkey Archive Press's 1995 edition had a new, definitive version with William Gass' foreword.

Gertrude's Matisse and Picasso descriptive essays appeared in Alfred Stieglitz's August 1912 edition of Camera Work, a special edition dedicated to Picasso and Matisse, and she was the first publication of her first publication. "[h]e was the first one to ever print anything that I had done," Gertrude said of this magazine. And you can imagine what it meant to me or to any one.

"A little prose vignette, a little bit of happy inspiration that had been detached from The Making of Americans' torrential prose, is evidently beginning with Stein's descriptive essays." In Kellner, 1988, Stein's earliest attempts at word portraits were catalogued by Mellow and under individual's names. Matisse and Picasso were among early essays that were later collected and published in Geography and Plays, Portraits and Prayers.

"Men" (Alice B. Toklas, Claribel Cone and Etta Cone), "Men" (Ethel Mars and Maurice Sterne), "Men" (1909, Mabel Dodge Luhan), "Picasso" (1909, Mabel Dodge Luhan), "Men" (Men) ("Matisse") (1913), "Men" (Alice B. Toklas), "Ada" ("Mene) (Men) "Men" (Ada Cone, "Mo") ("Ma Cone) ("Mene) (Mene") ("Men) ("Mene) ("Mene") "Men" (Mene) ("Men) ("Me") ("Ma") ("Men) ("Me") ("Men") (Men" ("Men") "Men") (Men) ("Men" (Me); "Ma") (Ma) (Men" (Men) and Men") (Moutput: "Men") "Ma" (Ad) (Men") "Ma) (Men") (Ma) (Men") (Ma" (Mathel Ruge"), "M) (Men") (Mo) ("Men" (Men) (Men) and "Me) ("M") (Ad) (Ada) (Men) (Men) (Adismo") (Men" (1911, Mabel Dodge Luhan) (Men"), "Men") "Matisse) ("Men") (E) ("Men") "Ma (Eta) (Me e ("Ma" (Equipe) ("Ma), "Ma) ("Ma) and "Mathema) ("Men" (Men) ("Ma") ("Ma) (Ad) (E) ("Men") (M) (E" (E), "Men") ("Men) (Equipe ("Men") (Ma) "Men" ("Men") (Men") Mabel Dodge Luhan) ("Me") "Men") ("Men" (Ma) ("Men") "Men") (Men) (Ma) (Men") (Ma) "Ma) (Men"), Mabel Dodge Luhan) ("Men") (Ada ") (Ado") ("Men") "Men") (Ma) ("Men"), "Mo") (Men) (Men") "Ma) (Men) (Ma) (Men") (Ado) "Men") (Ata) (1911, Mabel Dodge Luhan) ("Men"), "Ma) (Mathe") "Men"), "Mo") "Mo" (Men") ("Men) "Men" (Men"), "Ma) ("Men"), Mabel Dodge Luhan) and "Men" (Ma) (Ma) "Men") "Men"), Mabel Dodge Luhan) and "Ma) (Men), "Men"), "Ma) (A) (Ada), "Ma) (M) ("Ma) (Ma) "Men) (Ma a) "Men") (Men"), "Men") (Ma) "Men"), Mabel Dodge Luhan) "Men" (Men) (E, Mabel Dodge Luhan) (Men) (Adado) "Men") (Men) "Ma" (1911, Mabel Dodge Luhan) and Ma (Men") "Matisse") "Ma) (Al) ("Ma) "Men") "Ada) (Men) (Ethe Cone, "Ma) "Ma) (Mathe) (Men") Mabel Dodge Luhan) "Mada..."Men"), "Mata) "Ma" (Ma) "Ma (Etha, Mabel Dodge Luhan) "Mata) "Mer"), "Ada" (Men"), "Me") "Men"), Mabel Dodge Luhan, "Men"), "Ma, "Men" (1911, Mabel Dodge Luhan) ("Al) (

Tender Buttons is the most well-known of Stein's "hermetic" paintings. It is a small book divided into three sections: "Food, Objects, and Rooms," with each section containing prose under subtitles. Mabel Dodge Luhan and Stein's publication in 1914 caused a big debate between Mabel Dodge Luhan and Stein because Mabel had been trying to have it published by another publisher. Mabel spoke about why she felt it was not wise to publish it with the press Gertrude picked.

Evans wrote Gertrude:

Stein dismissed Mabel's instructions and published 1,000 copies of the book in 1914. In 2007, an antiquarian copy was worth more than $1,200. It is now in print and was re-released by City Lights Publishers as Tender Buttons: The Corrected Centennial Edition in March 2014.

In a "A Transatlantic Interview - 1946," Stein said that this work was entirely "realistic" in the tradition of Gustave Flaubert, including a tumbler or some other similar kind of object, "I used to take objects on a table to try to get the picture of it clear and distinct in my mind and create a word association between the word and the things seen." According to commentators, she meant that the naming of objects was central to her work, but that representation of them was not accurate. "[u]nlike her contemporaries (Eliot, Pound, Moore), she does not pose an image of a carafe on a table, but rather, she makes us reconsider how language actually constructs the world we know."

Gertrude Stein's autobiography, published in the United States, took him from literary anonymity to almost immediate fame. Despite being well-known in the American public, Stein was strongly chastised by people depicted in her book. Eugene Jolas, editor of Transition, published a pamphlet titled Testimony against Gertrude Stein, in which artists such as Henri Matisse and Georges Braque expressed their displeasure with Stein's depiction of the Parisian community of artists and intellectuals. "She had completely misunderstood cubism, which she sees simply in terms of personalities," Braque said in his response.

Ulysses S. Grant, a religious scholar, was published posthumously by Yale University Press in 1947, with an introduction by Thornton Wilder. Four in America produces alternate biographies of Ulysses S. Grant as a painter, George Washington as a novelist, and Henry James as a military general.

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