Gertrude Stein

Writer

Gertrude Stein was an American writer known for her role in the experimental arts and letters of Europe in the early part of the 20th century. She travelled in Paris, Vienna and San Francisco as a child, studied philosophy with William James at Radcliffe College and medicine at John Hopkins University. She moved to France in 1904 and found herself in the center of a crowd of artists that included Pablo Picasso, Ernest Hemingway and Henri Matisse. Stein's prose is often compared to the abstract paintings of the time, daring and, at times, nearly incomprehensible. Although Stein had been writing plays, prose and poetry for years, she was unknown to most readers until the 1933 publication of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, named after her companion of many years. Her other books include Three Lives (1908), Tender Buttons (1914) and The Making of Americans (1925).

Extra credit: Stein was known for using repetition in her writing; her often-quoted line "Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose" is from Sacred Emily (1913).

Stein is sometimes compared to another author surrounded by artists, Virginia Woolf.