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
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...
Occupation Natalie Clifford Barney
Gertrude Stein was the featured writer at a gathering of the Académie des Femmes at NCB 's salon. The programme included an introduction by Mina Loy , Barney's French translations of The Making of Americans...
Occupation Natalie Clifford Barney
In a letter to Gertrude Stein written in December 1926, NCB explains: The other night . . . I realized how little the French femmes de lettres know of English and Americans and vice versa...
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, 1996.
231
Publishing Laura Riding
LR published poems, essays, and a review in 1927-8 in transition, the little magazine produced in Paris by Eugene and Maria Jolas and Elliot Paul . Her critical essay here on Gertrude Stein was...
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 Tillie Olsen
Tillie Lerner, later TO , was nineteen when she began drafting a novel, and writing it was an element in her life for thirty years. In 1934 Bennett Cerf and Donald Klopfer , founders of...
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, 1983, 2 vols.
314
Parker, Peter, editor. A Reader’s Guide to Twentieth-Century Writers. Oxford University Press, 1996.
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, 1963.
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, 1971.
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...
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...
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, 1999, pp. xvii - xxxi; 1.
xxi-xxii
“Dictionary of Literary Biography online”. Gale Databases: Literature Resource Center-LRC.
4
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...

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