Gertrude Stein (February 3, 1874 July 27, 1946) was an American writer of novels, poetry and

plays. Born in West Allegheny (Pittsburgh), Pennsylvania and raised in Oakland, California, Stein
moved to Paris in 1903, making France her home for the remainder of her life. A literary innovator
and pioneer of Modernist literature, Steins work broke with the narrative, linear, and temporal
conventions of 19th-century. She was also known as a collector of Modernist art.
In 1933, Stein published a kind of memoir of her Paris years, The Autobiography of Alice B.
Toklas, written in the voice of Toklas, her life partner. The book became a literary bestseller and
vaulted Stein from the relative obscurity of cult literary figure into the light of mainstream
attention.[1]
Gertrude Stein, the youngest of a family of five children, was born on February 3, 1874,
in Allegheny, Pennsylvania (merged with Pittsburgh in 1907)[2] to upper-class Jewish parents,
Daniel and Amelia Stein. German and English were spoken at their home. [3] Stein's father was a
wealthy businessman with real estate holdings, and director of San Francisco street car lines,
the Market Street Railway, in an era when public transportation was a privately owned enterprise.
[4]

When Stein was three years old she and her family moved to Vienna and then Paris.
Accompanied by governesses and tutors, the Steins endeavored to imbue their children with the
cultured sensibilities of European history and life. [5]After a year-long sojourn abroad, they returned
to America in 1878, settling in Oakland, California, where Stein attended First Hebrew
Congregation of Oakland's Sabbath school.[6]
Her mother died in 1888 and her father in 1891. Michael Stein, the eldest brother, took over the
family business holdings. He arranged for Gertrude and another sister, Bertha, to live with their
mother's family in Baltimore after the deaths of their parents.[7] In 1892, she lived with her
uncle David Bachrach.[8] Bachrach had married Fanny Keyser, sister of Gertrude's mother Amelia,
in 1877.
In Baltimore, Stein met Claribel Cone and Etta Cone, who held Saturday evening salons that she
would later emulate in Paris. The Cones shared an appreciation for art and conversation about it
and modeled a domestic division of labor that Stein would replicate in her relationship with Alice
B. Toklas.[9]

Education[edit]
Radcliffe[edit]
Stein attended Radcliffe College, then an annex of Harvard University, from 1893 to 1897 and
was a student of psychologist William James. With James's supervision, Stein and another
student, Leon Mendez Solomons, performed experiments on normal motor automatism, a
phenomenon hypothesized to occur in people when their attention is divided between two
simultaneous intelligent activities such as writing and speaking.
These experiments yielded examples of writing that appeared to represent "stream of
consciousness", a psychological theory often attributed to James and the style of modernist
authors Virginia
Woolf and James
Joyce.
In
1934,
behavioral
psychologist B.F.
Skinner interpreted Stein's difficult poem Tender Buttons as an example of normal motor
automatism.[10] In a letter Stein wrote during the 1930s, she explained that she never accepted the
theory of automatic writing: "[T]here can be automatic movements, but not automatic writing.
Writing for the normal person is too complicated an activity to be indulged in automatically." [11]
At Radcliffe, she began a lifelong friendship with Mabel Foote Weeks, whose correspondence
traces much of the progression of Stein's life. In 1897, Stein spent the summer in Woods Hole,
Massachusetts, studying embryology at the Marine Biological Laboratory.[12]

Johns Hopkins[edit]
William James, who had become a committed mentor to Stein at Radcliffe, recognizing her
intellectual potential, and declaring her his "most brilliant woman student", encouraged Stein to
enroll in medical school, although Stein professed she had no interest in either the theory or
practice of medicine. She spent two years at Johns Hopkins Medical School, failing two courses

and leaving without a degree. Ultimately, medical school had bored Stein, and she had spent
many of her evenings not applying herself to her studies, but taking long walks and attending the
opera.[5][13]
Stein's tenure at Johns Hopkins was marked by challenge and stress. Men dominated the
medical field, and the inclusion of women in the profession was not unreservedly or unanimously
welcomed. Writing of this period in her life ("Things As They Are", 1903) Stein often revealed
herself as a depressed young woman dealing with a paternalistic culture, struggling to find her
own identity, which she realized could not conform to the conventional female role. Her
uncorseted physical appearance and eccentric mode of dress aroused comment and she was
described as "Big and floppy and sandaled and not caring a damn".[14][15]
Asked to give a lecture to a group of Baltimore women in 1899, Stein gave a controversial speech
titled "The Value of College Education for Women", undoubtedly designed to provoke the largely
middle-class audience. In the lecture Stein maintained:
"average middle class woman [supported by] some male relative, a husband or father or
brother,...[is] not worth her keep economically considered." [This economic dependence caused
her to become] oversexed...adapting herself to the abnormal sex desire of the male...and
becoming a creature that should have been first a human being and then a woman into one that
is a woman first and always."
While a student at Johns Hopkins and purportedly still nave about sexual matters, Stein
experienced an awakening of her latent sexuality. Sometime in 1899 or 1900, she became
infatuated with Mary Bookstaver who was involved in a relationship with a medical student, Mabel
Haynes. Witnessing the relationship between the two women served for Stein as her "erotic
awakening". The unhappy love triangle demoralized Stein, arguably contributing to her decision
to abandon her medical studies.[15]
In 1902 Stein's brother Leo Stein left for London, and Stein followed. The following year the two
relocated to Paris, where Leo hoped to pursue an art career.[13]

Art collection[edit]
Gertrude and her brother Leo shared living quarters on the Left Bank of Paris at 27 rue de
Fleurus from 1903 until 1914, when they dissolved their common household. Their residence,
located near the Luxembourg Gardens, was a two-story building with adjacent studio. It was here
they accumulated the works of art into a collection that would become renowned for its
prescience and historical importance.
The gallery space was furnished with imposing, Renaissance era furniture manufactured
inFlorence, Italy. The paintings lined the walls in tiers trailing many feet to the ceiling. Initially
illuminated by gaslight, the artwork was later lit by electric light shortly prior to World War I.[16]
The joint collection of Gertrude and Leo Stein began in late 1904 when Michael Stein announced
that their trust account had accumulated a balance of 8,000 francs. They spent this at Vollard's
Gallery,
buying Gauguin's Sunflowers[17] and Three
Tahitians,[18] Czanne's Bathers,[19] and
[20]
two Renoirs.
Leo Stein cultivated important art world connections, enabling the Stein holdings to grow over
time. Bernard Berenson hosted Gertrude and Leo in his English country house in 1902,
facilitating their introduction to Paul Czanne and Ambroise Vollard's art gallery.[21]
The art collection increased and the walls at Rue de Fleurus were rearranged continually to make
way for new acquisitions.[22] In "the first half of 1905" the Steins acquired Czanne's Portrait of
Mme Czanne and Delacroix's Perseus and Andromeda.[23] Shortly after the opening of the Salon
d'Automne of 1905 (on October 18, 1905), the Steins acquired Matisse's Woman with a Hat[24] and
Picasso's Young Girl with Basket of Flowers.[25]
Henry McBride (art critic for the New York Sun) did much for Stein's reputation in the United
States, publicizing her art acquisitions and her importance as a cultural figure. Of the art
collection at 27 Rue de Fleurus, McBride commented: "[I]n proportion to its size and quality... [it
is] just about the most potent of any that I have ever heard of in history." [26]McBride also made the
observation that Gertrude "collected geniuses rather than masterpieces. She recognized them a
long way off."[26]
By early 1906, Leo and Gertrude Stein's studio had many paintings by Henri Manguin, Pierre
Bonnard, Pablo Picasso, Paul Czanne, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Honor Daumier,Henri Matisse,
and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec.[27] Their collection was representative of two famous art
exhibitions that took place during their residence together in Paris, and to which they contributed,

either by lending their art, or by patronizing the featured artists. [28] The Steins' elder brother,
Michael, and sister-in-law Sarah (Sally) acquired a large number of Henri Matisse paintings;
Gertrude's friends from Baltimore, Claribel and Etta Cone, collected similarly, eventually donating
their art collection, virtually intact, to theBaltimore Museum of Art[29]
While numerous artists visited the Stein salon, many of these artists were not represented among
the paintings on the walls at 27 Rue de Fleurus. Where Renoir, Czanne, Matisse, and Picasso's
works dominated Leo and Gertrude's collection, the collection of Michael and Sarah
Stein emphasized Matisse.[30]
In April 1914 Leo relocated to Settignano, Italy, near Florence, and the art collection was divided.
The division of the Steins' art collection was described in a letter by Leo:
The Czanne apples have a unique importance to me that nothing can replace. The Picasso
landscape is not important in any such sense. We are, as it seems to me on the whole, both so
well off now that we needn't repine. The Czanne's had to be divided. I am willing to leave you
the Picasso oeuvre, as you left me the Renoir, and you can have everything except that. I want to
keep the few drawings that I have. This leaves no string for me, it is financially equable either way
for estimates are only rough & ready methods, & I'm afraid you'll have to look upon the loss of the
apples as an act of God. I have been anxious above all things that each should have in reason all
that he wanted, and just as I was glad that Renoir was sufficiently indifferent to you so that you
were ready to give them up, so I am glad that Pablo is sufficiently indifferent to me that I am
willing to let you have all you want of it.[31][32]
Leo departed with sixteen Renoirs, and relinquishing the Picassos and most of Matisse to his
sister, took only a portrait sketch Picasso had done of him. He remained dedicated to Czanne,
nonetheless, leaving all the artist's works with his sister, taking with him only a Czanne painting
of "5 apples".[16]
The split between brother and sister was acrimonious. Stein did not see Leo Stein again for more
than thirty years, and then through only a brief greeting on the street. After this accidental
encounter, they never saw or spoke to each other again. [16]
The Steins' holdings were dispersed eventually by various methods and for various reasons. [33]
After Stein's and Leo's households separated in 1914, she continued to collect examples of
Picasso's art, which had turned to Cubism, a style Leo did not appreciate. At her death,
Gertrude's remaining collection emphasized the artwork of Picasso and Juan Gris, most of her
other pictures having been sold.[34]
Gertrude Stein's personality has dominated the provenance of the Stein art legacy. It was,
however, her brother Leo who was the astute art appraiser. Alfred Barr Jr., the founding director
of New York's Museum of Modern Art, said that between the years of 1905 and 1907, "[Leo] was
possibly the most discerning connoisseur and collector of 20th century painting in the
world."[35] After the artworks were divided between the two siblings, it was Gertrude Stein that
moved on to champion the works of what proved to be lesser talents in the 1930s. She
concentrated on the work of Juan Gris, Andr Masson, and Sir Francis Rose. In 1932, Stein
asserted: "painting now after its great period has come back to be a minor art." [16]
In 1945, in a preface for the first exhibition of Spanish painter Francisco Riba Rovira (who painted
a portrait of her), Stein wrote:
I explained that for me, all modern painting is based on what Czanne nearly made, instead of
basing itself on what he almost managed to make. When he could not make a thing, he hijacked
it and left it. He insisted on showing his incapacity: he spread his lack of success: showing what
he could not do, became an obsession for him. People influenced by him were also obsessed by
the things which they could not reach and they began the system of camouflage. It was natural to
do so, even inevitable: that soon became an art, in peace and in war, and Matisse concealed and
insisted at the same time on that Czanne could not realize, and Picasso concealed, played and
tormented all these things. The only one who wanted to insist on this problem, was Juan Gris. He
persisted by deepening the things which Czanne wanted to do, but it was too hard a task for
him: it killed him. And now here we are, I find a young painter who does not follow the tendency to
play with what Czanne could not do, but who attacks any right the things which he tried to make,
to create the objects which have to exist, for, and in themselves, and not in relation. [36][37]

27 rue de Fleurus: The Stein salon[edit]

The gatherings in the Stein home "brought together confluences of talent and thinking that would
help define modernism in literature and art". Dedicated attendees included Pablo Picasso, Ernest

Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sinclair Lewis, Ezra Pound, Thornton Wilder,Sherwood

Anderson, Francis Cyril Rose, Ren Crevel, lisabeth de Gramont, Francis Picabia, Claribel
Cone, Mildred Aldrich, Carl Van Vechten and Henri Matisse.[38] Saturday evenings had been set as
the fixed day and time for formal congregation so Stein could work at her writing uninterrupted by
impromptu visitors. It was Stein's partner Alice who became the de facto hostess for the wives
and girlfriends of the artists in attendance, who met in a separate room.
Upon the birth of his son, frequent attender Ernest Hemingway asked Stein to be the godmother
of his child. During the summer of 1931, Stein advised the young composer and writer Paul
Bowles to go to Tangier, where she and Alice had vacationed.
Gertrude herself attributed the beginnings of the Saturday evening salons to Matisse, as
[m]ore and more frequently, people began visiting to see the Matisse paintingsand the
Czannes: "Matisse brought people, everybody brought somebody, and they came at any time
and it began to be a nuisance, and it was in this way that Saturday evenings began." [39]
Among Picasso's acquaintances who frequented the Saturday evenings were: Fernande Olivier
(Picasso's mistress), Georges Braque (artist), Andr Derain (artist), Max Jacob(poet), Guillaume
Apollinaire (poet), Marie Laurencin (artist, and Apollinaire's mistress), Henri Rousseau (painter),
and Joseph Stella.[40]
While Stein has been credited with inventing the term "Lost Generation" for those whose defining
moment in time and coming of age had been World War I and its aftermath, at least three
versions of the story that led to the phrase are on record, two by Ernest Hemingway and one by
Gertrude Stein.[41]

Literary style[edit]
Stein's writing can be placed in three categories: "hermetic" works best illustrated by The Making
of Americans: The Hersland Family; popularized writing such as The Autobiography of Alice B.
Toklas; and speech writing and more accessible autobiographical writing of later years, of
which Brewsie and Willie is a good example. Her works include novels, plays, stories, libretti and
poems written in a highly idiosyncratic, playful, repetitive, and humorous style. Typical quotes are:
"Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose"; "Out of kindness comes redness and out of rudeness comes
rapid same question, out of an eye comes research, out of selection comes painful cattle"; about
her childhood home in Oakland, "There is no there there"; and "The change of color is likely and
a difference a very little difference is prepared. Sugar is not a vegetable."
These stream-of-consciousness experiments, rhythmical essays or "portraits", were designed to
evoke "the excitingness of pure being" and can be seen as literature's answer to Cubism,
plasticity, and collage. Many of the experimental works such as Tender Buttons have since been
interpreted by critics as a feminist reworking of patriarchal language. These works were well
received by avant-garde critics but did not initially achieve mainstream success. Despite Stein's
work on automatic writing with William James, she did not see her work as automatic, but as an
'excess of consciousness'.[citation needed]
Though Gertrude collected cubist paintings, especially those of Picasso, the largest visual
influence on her work is that of Czanne. Particularly, he influenced her idea of equality,
distinguished from universality: "the whole field of the canvas is important" (p. 8[full citation needed]). Rather
than a figure/ground relationship, "Stein in her work with words used the entire text as a field in
which every element mattered as much as any other." It is a subjective relationship that includes
multiple viewpoints. Stein explained: "The important thing is that you must have deep down as
the deepest thing in you a sense of equality."
Her use of repetition is ascribed to her search for descriptions of the "bottom nature" of her
characters, such as in The Making of Americans where the narrator is described through the
repetition of narrative phrases such as "As I was saying" and "There will be now a history of her."
Stein used many Anglo-Saxon words and avoided words with "too much association". Social
judgement is absent in her writing, so the reader is given the power to decide how to think and
feel about the writing. Anxiety, fear and anger are also absent, and her work is harmonic and
integrative.[citation needed]
Stein predominantly used the present progressive tense, creating a continuous present in her
work, which Grahn argues is a consequence of the previous principles, especially commonality
and centeredness. Grahn describes "play" as the granting of autonomy and agency to the
readers or audience: "rather than the emotional manipulation that is a characteristic of linear
writing, Stein uses play."[42] In addition Stein's work is funny, and multilayered, allowing a variety of

interpretations and engagements. Lastly Grahn argues that one must "insterstand... engage with
the work, to mix with it in an active engagement, rather than 'figuring it out.' Figure it in." [43]
In 1932, using an accessible style to appeal to a wider audience, she wrote The Autobiography of
Alice B. Toklas; the book would become her first best-seller. Despite the title, it was actually
Stein's autobiography. The style was quite similar to that of The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook, which
was written by Toklas.
Several of Stein's writings have been set to music by composers, including Virgil Thomson's
operas Four Saints in Three Acts and The Mother of Us All, and James Tenney's setting of Rose
is a rose is a rose is a rose as a canon dedicated to Philip Corner, beginning with "a" on an
upbeat and continuing so that each repetition shuffles the words, e.g. "a/rose is a rose/is a rose
is/a rose is a/rose."

Literary career[edit]
While living in Paris, Stein began submitting her writing for publication. Her earliest writings were
mainly retellings of her college experiences. Her first critically acclaimed publication was Three
Lives. In 1911, Mildred Aldrich introduced Stein to Mabel Dodge Luhanand they began a shortlived but fruitful friendship during which the wealthy Mabel Dodge promoted Gertrude's legend in
the United States.
Mabel was enthusiastic about Stein's sprawling publication The Makings of Americans and, at a
time when Stein had much difficulty selling her writing to publishers, privately published 300
copies of Portrait of Mabel Dodge at Villa Curonia,[34] a copy of which was valued at $25,000 in
2007.[45] Dodge was also involved in the publicity and planning of the 69th Armory Show in 1913,
"the first avant-garde art exhibition in America".[34]
In addition, she wrote the first critical analysis of Stein's writing to appear in America, in
"Speculations, or Post-Impressionists in Prose", published in a special March 1913 publication
of Arts and Decoration.[46] Foreshadowing Stein's later critical reception, Dodge wrote in
"Speculations":
In Gertrude Stein's writing every word lives and, apart from concept, it is so exquisitely rhythmical
and cadenced that if we read it aloud and receive it as pure sound, it is like a kind of sensuous
music. Just as one may stop, for once, in a way, before a canvas of Picasso, and, letting one's
reason sleep for an instant, may exclaim: "It is a fine pattern!" so, listening to Gertrude Stein's
words and forgetting to try to understand what they mean, one submits to their gradual charm. [46]
Stein and Carl Van Vechten, the noted critic and photographer, became acquainted in Paris in
1913. The two became lifelong friends, devising pet names for each other: Van Vechten was
"Papa Woojums", and Stein, "Baby Woojums". Van Vechten served as an enthusiastic champion
of Stein's literary work in the United States, in effect becoming her American agent. [38]

Stein in America (19341935)[edit]

In October 1934, Stein arrived in America after a 30-year absence. Disembarking from the ocean
liner in New York, she encountered a throng of reporters. Front-page articles on Stein appeared
in almost every New York City newspaper. As she rode through Manhattan to her hotel, she was
able get a sense of the publicity that would hallmark her US tour. An electric sign in Times
Square announced to all that "Gertrude Stein Has Arrived."[47]
Her six-month tour of the country encompassed 191 days of travel, criss-crossing 23 states and
visiting 37 cities. The lectures Stein prepared for each stop over conformed to a formal structure,
and the audience was limited to five hundred attendees for each venue. She spoke, reading from
notes, and provided for an audience question and answer period at the end of her presentation. [47]
The effectiveness of Stein as a lecture speaker provoked varying evaluations. At the time, some
maintained that "Stein's audiences by and large did not understand her lectures." Some of those
in the psychiatric community weighed in, judging that Stein suffered from a speech
disorder, palilalia, which caused her "to stutter over words and phrases". The predominant
feeling, however, was that Stein was a compelling presence, a fascinating personality who had
the ability to hold listeners with the "musicality of her language". [47]
In Washington, D.C. Stein was invited to have tea with the President's wife, Eleanor Roosevelt.
In Beverly Hills, California, she visited with Charlie Chaplin who reportedly discussed the future of
cinema with her.[47]
Stein left America in May 1935, a newly minted America celebrity with a commitment
from Random House, who had agreed to become the American publisher for all future works. [47]

The Chicago Daily Tribune wrote after Stein's return to Paris: "No writer in years has been so
widely discussed, so much caricatured, so passionately championed."[47]

Books[edit]
Q.E.D.[edit]
Gertrude completed Q.E.D. (Quod Erat Demonstrandum) on October 24, 1903.[48] This piece is
discussed more completely later in this article at Lesbian relationships.
Fernhurst (1904)[edit]
In 1904 Stein began this fictional account of a scandalous three-person romantic affair involving a
dean (M. Carey Thomas) and a faculty member (Mary Gwinn) from Bryn Mawr College and a
Harvard graduate (Alfred Hodder). [49] Mellow asserts that Fernhurst "is a decidedly minor and
awkward piece of writing".[50] It includes some commentary that Gertrude mentioned in her
autobiography when she discussed the "fateful twenty-ninth year" [50] during which:
All the forces that have been engaged through the years of childhood, adolescence and youth in
confused and ferocious combat range themselves in ordered ranks (and during which) the
straight and narrow gateway of maturity, and life which was all uproar and confusion narrows
down to form and purpose, and we exchange a great dim possibility for a small hard reality.
Also in our American life where there is no coercion in custom and it is our right to change our
vocation so often as we have desire and opportunity, it is a common experience that our youth
extends through the whole first twenty-nine years of our life and it is not till we reach thirty that we
find at last that vocation for which we feel ourselves fit and to which we willingly devote continued
labor.[51]
Mellow observes that, in 1904, 30-year-old Gertrude "had evidently determined that the 'small
hard reality' of her life would be writing".[52]
Three Lives (19051906)[edit]
Stein attributed the inception of this work to the inspiration she received from a portrait Czanne
had painted of his wife and which was in the Stein collection. She credited this as a revelatory
moment in the evolution of her writing style. Stein described:

that the stylistic method of (Three Lives) had been influenced by th

She began her novel Three Lives during the spring of 1905, and finished it the following year.[54]
The Making of Americans (19021911)[edit]
Gertrude Stein stated the date for her writing of The Making of Americans was 19068. Her
biographer has uncovered evidence that it actually began in 1902 and did not end until 1911.
[55]
Stein compared her work to James Joyce's Ulysses and to Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost
Time. Her critics were less enthusiastic about it. [56] First publication inAlfred Stieglitz's Camera
Work (August 1912).
Further publication history[edit]
Stein wrote the bulk of the novel between 1903 and 1911, and evidence from her manuscripts
suggests three major periods of revision during that time. [57] The manuscript remained mostly
hidden from public view until 1924 when, at the urging of Ernest Hemingway, Ford Madox
Ford agreed to publish excerpts in the transatlantic review.[58] In 1925, the Paris-based Contact
Press published a limited run of the novel consisting of 500 copies. A much-abridged edition was
published by Harcourt Brace in 1934, but the full version remained out of print until Something
Else Press republished it in 1966. In 1995, a new, definitive edition was published by Dalkey
Archive Press with a foreword byWilliam Gass.[59]
Gertrude's Matisse and Picasso descriptive essays appeared in Alfred Stieglitz's August 1912
edition of Camera Work, a special edition devoted to Picasso and Matisse, and represented her
very first publication.[60] Of this publication, Gertrude said, "[h]e was the first one that ever printed
anything that I had done. And you can imagine what that meant to me or to any one." [60]
Word Portraits (19081913)[edit]
Stein's descriptive essays apparently began with her essay of Alice B. Toklas, "a little prose
vignette, a kind of happy inspiration that had detached itself from the torrential prose of The
Making of Americans".[61] Stein's early efforts at word portraits are catalogued in Mellow (1974,
pp. 12937) and under individual's names in Kellner, 1988. Matisse and Picasso were subjects of

early essays,[62] later collected and published in Geography and Plays[63] and Portraits and Prayers.
[64][65][66]

Her subjects included several ultimately famous personages, and her subjects provided a
description of what she observed in her Saturday salons at 27 Rue de Fleurus: "Ada" (Alice B.
Toklas), "Two Women" (The Cone sisters, Claribel Cone and Etta Cone), Miss Furr and Miss
Skeene (Ethel Mars and Maud Hunt Squire, "Men" (Hutchins Hapgood,Peter David
Edstrom, Maurice Sterne), "Matisse" (1909, Henri Matisse), "Picasso" (1909, Pablo Picasso),
"Portrait of Mabel Dodge at the Villa Curonia" (1911, Mabel Dodge Luhan), and "Guillaume
Apollinaire" (1913).
Tender Buttons (1912)[edit]
Tender Buttons is the best known of Gertrude Stein's "hermetic" works. It is a small book
separated into three sectionsFood, Objects and Rooms each containing prose under subtitles.
[67]
Its publication in 1914 caused a great dispute between Mabel Dodge Luhan and Stein,
because Mabel had been working to have it published by another publisher.[68] Mabel wrote at
length about the bad choice of publishing it with the press Gertrude selected. [68] Evans wrote
Gertrude:
Claire Marie Press... is absolutely third rate, & in bad odor here, being called for the most part
'decadent" and Broadwayish and that sort of thing... I think it would be a pity to publish with
[Claire Marie Press] if it will emphasize the idea in the opinion of the public, that there is
something degenerate & effete & decadent about the whole of the cubist movement which
they all connect you with, because, hang it all, as long as they don't understand a thing they think
all sorts of things. My feeling in this is quite strong.[68]
Stein ignored Mabel's exhortations, and eventually Mabel, and published 1,000 copies of the
book, in 1914. An antiquarian copy was valued at over $1,200 in 2007. It is currently in print, and
was re-released as Tender Buttons: The Corrected Centennial Edition by City Lights Publishers in
March, 2014.
In an interview with Robert Bartlett Haas in "A Transatlantic Interview - 1946", Stein insisted that
this work was completely "realistic" in the tradition of Gustave Flaubert, stating the following: "I
used to take objects on a table, like a tumbler or any kind of object and try to get the picture of it
clear and separate in my mind and create a word relationship between the word and the things
seen." Commentators have indicated that what she meant was that the reference of objects
remained central to her work, although therepresentation of them had not.[69] Scholar Marjorie
Perloff had said of Stein that "[u]nlike her contemporaries (Eliot, Pound, Moore), she does not
give us an image, however fractured, of a carafe on a table; rather, she forces us to reconsider
how language actually constructs the world we know."

"There is no there there"[edit]

Along with a "A rose is a rose is a rose is a rose", "there is no there there" is one of the most
famous quotations of Gertrude Stein. It appears in Gertrude Stein, Everybody's
Autobiography (Random House 1937, p 289) and is often applied to the city of her childhood,
Oakland, California. Defenders and critics of Oakland have debated what she really meant when
she said this in 1933 after coming to San Francisco on a book tour. She took a ferry to Oakland to
visit the farm she grew up on, and the house she lived in near what is now 13th Avenue and E.
25th Street in Oakland. The house had been razed and the farmland had been developed with
new housing in the 3 decades since her father had sold the property and moved closer to the
commercial hub of the neighborhood on Washington Street (now 12th Avenue). She wrote:
She took us to see her granddaughter who was teaching in the Dominican convent in San
Raphael, we went across the bay on a ferry, that had not changed but Goat Island might just as
well not have been there, anyway what was the use of my having come from Oakland it was not
natural to have come from there yes write about it if I like or anything if I like but not there, there is
no there there.[88]
...but not there, there is no there there. ... Ah Thirteenth Avenue was the same it was shabby and
overgrown. ... Not of course the house, the house the big house and the big garden and the
eucalyptus trees and the rose hedge naturally were not there any longer existing, what was the
use ...
It is a funny thing about addresses where you live. When you live there you know it so well that it
is like an identity a thing that is so much a thing that it could not ever be any other thing and then
you live somewhere else and years later, the address that was so much an address that it was

like your name and you said it as if it was not an address but something that was living and then
years after you do not know what the address was and when you say it it is not a name anymore
but something you cannot remember. That is what makes your identity not a thing that exists but
something you do or do not remember.

Political views[edit]
According to Janet Malcolm's contested account in Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice, Stein was a
vocal critic of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the New Deal.[89][90][91]
While some have stressed her queer, feminist, pro-immigration, and democratic politics, [92][93] her
statements on immigration include sentiments that would be considered racist today. In a 1934
interview published in the New York Times she stated:
That is the reason why I do not approve of the stringent immigration laws in America today. We
need the stimulation of new blood. It is best to favor healthy competition. There is no reason why
we should not select our immigrants with greater care, nor why we should not bar certain peoples
and preserve the color line for instance. But if we shut down on immigration completely we shall
become stagnant.[94]
She publicly endorsed General Francisco Franco during the Spanish Civil War and admired Vichy
leader Marshal Philippe Ptain.[89] Some have argued for a more nuanced view of Stein's
collaborationist activity, arguing that it was rooted in her wartime predicament and status as a Jew
in Nazi-occupied France.[95][96][97][98] Similarly, Stein commented at 1938 on Benito Mussolini, Adolf
Hitler, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Joseph Stalin and Leon Trotsky: "There is too much fathering going
on just now and there is no doubt about it fathers are depressing."[87]

Stein during World War II[edit]

While identified with the modernist movements in art and literature, Stein's political affiliations
were a mix of reactionary and progressive ideas. She was outspoken in her hostility to some
liberal reforms of progressive politics. To Stein, the industrial revolution had acted as a negative
societal force, disrupting stability, degrading values, and subsequently affecting cultural decline.
Stein idealized the 18th century as the golden age of civilization, epitomized in America as the
era of its founding fathers and what was in France, the glory of its pre-revolutionary Ancien
Rgime.[99][100] At the same time, she was pro-immigrant, pro-democratic, and anti-patriarchal.
[101]
Her last major work was the libretto of the feminist opera The Mother of Us All (1947) about
the socially progressive suffragette movement and another work from this time, Brewsie and
Willie (1946), expressed strong support for American G.I.s.
A compendium of source material confirms that Stein may have been able to save her life and
sustain her lifestyle through the protection of powerful Vichy government officialBernard Fa.
Stein had met Fay in 1926, and he became her "dearest friend during her life", according to Alice
B. Toklas. Fa had been the primary translator of Stein's work into French and subsequently
masterminded her 193334 American book tour, which gave Stein celebrity status and proved to
be a highly successful promotion of her memoir, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas.[99] Fay's
influence was instrumental in avoiding Nazi confiscation of the Stein's historically significant and
monetarily valuable collection of artwork, which throughout the war years was housed in Stein's
Paris rue Christine apartment, under locked safeguard.[102]
In 1941, at Fa's suggestion, Stein consented to translate into English some 180 pages of
speeches made by Marshal Philippe Ptain. In her introduction, Stein crafts an analogy
between George Washington, and Ptain. She writes of the high esteem in which Ptain is held
by his countrymen; France respected and admired the man who had struck an armistice with
Hitler. Conceived and targeted for an American readership, Stein's translations were ultimately
never published in the United States. Random House publisherBennett Cerf had read the
introduction Stein had written for the translations and been horrified by what she had produced. [103]
Of Jewish parentage, Stein collaborated with Vichy France, a regime that deported more than
75,000 Jews to Nazi concentration camps, of whom only 3 percent survived theHolocaust.[99][104] In
1944, Stein wrote that Petain's policies were "really wonderful so simple so natural so
extraordinary". This was Stein's contention in the year when the town ofCuloz, where she and
Toklas resided, saw the removal of its Jewish children to Auschwitz.[82] It is difficult to say,
however, how aware Stein was of these events. As she wrote inWars I Have Seen, "However
near a war is it is always not very near. Even when it is here." [105] Stein had stopped translating
Petain's speeches three years previously, in 1941.

Stein was able to condemn the Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor while simultaneously maintaining
the dissonant acceptance of Hitler as conqueror of Europe. [99] Journalist Lanning Warren
interviewed Stein in her Paris apartment in a piece published in The New York Times
Magazine on May 6, 1934. Stein, seemingly ironically, proclaimed that Hitler merited the Nobel
Peace Prize.
"The Saxon element is always destined to be dominated. The Germans have no gift at
organizing. They can only obey. And obedience is not organization. Organization comes
from community of will as well as community of action. And in America our democracy has
been based on community of will and effort.... I say Hitler ought to have the peace
prize...because he is removing all elements of contest and struggle from Germany. By
driving out the Jews and the democratic Left elements, he is driving out everything that
conduces to activity. That means peace."[99][102][103][106]
Given that after the war Stein commented that the only way to ensure world peace was to
teach the Germans disobedience,[107] this 1934 Stein interview has come to be interpreted as
an ironic jest made by a practiced iconoclast hoping to gain attention and provoke
controversy. In an effort to correct popular mainstream misrepresentations of Stein's wartime
activity, a dossier of articles by critics and historians has been gathered for the online journal
Jacket2.[108]
How much of Stein's wartime activities were motivated by the real exigencies of selfpreservation in a dangerous environment, can only be speculated upon. However, her loyalty
to Ptain may have gone beyond expedience. [103][108] She had been urged to leave France by
American embassy officials, friends and family when that possibility still existed, but declined
to do so. Accustomed to a life of entitlement since birth, Stein may have been convinced her
wealth and notoriety would exempt her from what had befallen other European Jews. In an
essay written for the Atlantic Monthly in November 1940, Stein had written about her decision
not to leave France: "it would be awfully uncomfortable and I am fussy about my food." Stein
continued to praise Ptain after the war ended, this at a time when Ptain had been
sentenced to death by a French court for treason.[99]
Author Djuna Barnes provided a caustic assessment of Stein's book, "Wars I Have Seen":
"You do not feel that she [Stein] is ever really worried about the sorrows of the people.
Her concerns at its highest pitch is a well-fed apprehension." [82]
Others have argued that some of the accounts of Stein's war time activities have
amounted to a "witch hunt".[109]

Death[edit]
Stein died at the age of 72 from stomach cancer in Neuilly-sur-Seine on July 27, 1946,
and was interred in Paris in Pre Lachaise Cemetery. When Stein was being wheeled
into the operating room for surgery on her stomach, she asked Toklas, "What is the
answer?" When Toklas did not reply, Stein said, "In that case, what is the
question?"[110] Stein named writer and photographer Carl Van Vechten as her literary
executor, and he helped to publish works of hers that remained unpublished at the time
of her death. There is a monument to Stein on the Upper Terrace of Bryant Park, New
York.

Critical reception of Stein as writer[edit]

Sherwood Anderson in his public introduction to Stein's 1922 publication of Geography
and Plays wrote:
For me the work of Gertrude Stein consists in a rebuilding, an entirely new
recasting of life, in the city of words. Here is one artist who has been able to
accept ridicule, who has even forgone the privilege of writing the great American
novel, uplifting our English speaking stage, and wearing the bays of the great
poets to go live among the little housekeeping words, the swaggering bullying
street-corner words, the honest working, money saving words and all the other
forgotten and neglected citizens of the sacred and half forgotten city.
In a private letter to his brother Karl, Anderson said, "As for Stein, I do not think her too
important. I do think she had an important thing to do, not for the public, but for the artist
who happens to work with words as his material.[111]"

Other critics took a more negative view of Stein's work. F. W. Dupee (1990, p. IX) defines
"Steinese" as "gnomic, repetitive, illogical, sparsely punctuated... a scandal and a delight,
lending itself equally to derisory parody and fierce denunciation".
Composer Constant Lambert (1936) compares Stravinsky's choice of "the drabbest and
least significant phrases" in L'Histoire du Soldat to Gertrude Stein's in "Helen Furr and
Georgine Skeene" (1922), specifically: "[E]veryday they were gay there, they were
regularly gay there everyday." He writes that the "effect would be equally appreciated by
someone with no knowledge of English whatsoever", apparently missing the pun
frequently employed by Stein.
James Thurber wrote:
Anyone who reads at all diversely during these bizarre 1920s cannot escape the
conclusion that a number of crazy men and women are writing stuff which
remarkably passes for important composition among certain persons who should
know better. Stuart P. Sherman, however, refused to be numbered among those
who stand in awe and admiration of one of the most eminent of the idiots,
Gertrude Stein. He reviews her Geography and Plays in the August 11 issue of
the Literary Review of the New York Evening Post and arrives at the conviction
that it is a marvellous and painstaking achievement in setting down approximately
80,000 words which mean nothing at all.[112]
Author Katherine Ann Porter provided her own estimation of Stein's literary legacy: "Wise
or silly or nothing at all, down everything goes on the page with an air of everything being
equal, unimportant in itself important because it happened to her and she was writing
about it."[113]
History Professor Blanche Wiesen Cook, has written of Stein: "She was not a radical
feminist. She was Jewish and anti-Semitic, lesbian and contemptuous of women,
ignorant about economics and hostile to socialism."[113]
Writing for Vanity Fair magazine in 1923, eminent literary critic Edmund
Wilson presciently came to an evaluation similar to the one made by Katharine Ann
Porter some twenty years later, after Stein's death. Wilson deemed that Stein's technique
was one of flawed methodology, using words analogous to the way Cubists manipulated
abstract forms in their artworks. As Wilson wrote, unlike the plastic arts, literature deals
with
"human speech [which] is a tissue of ideas....Miss Stein no longer understands the
conditions under which literary effects have to be produced...There is sometimes genuine
music in the most baffling of her works, but there are rarely any communicated
emotions."[114]
An elevated observer, perched high above everything below, he likened Stein to a
self-conceived "Buddha...registering impressions like some august seismograph". [114]
Stein's literary output was a subject of amusement for her brother Leo Stein, who
characterized her writing as an "abomination". Later detractors of Stein's work
deemed her experimentation as the serendipitous result of her alleged inability to
communicate through linguistic convention, deficient in the skills required "to deal
effectively with language, so that she made her greatest weakness into her most
remarkable strength".[113]

Legacy and commemoration[edit]

Gertrude Stein has been the subject of many artistic works. Stein and Toklas merit
their own line each in the song "Bosom Buddies" from the 1966 Broadway musical
MAME, based on the stage play Auntie Mame, by composer-lyricist Jerry Herman. In
MAME, Vera Charles, Mame Dennis' actress-confidante pal, sings: "...I'll always be
Alice Toklas, if you'll be Gertrude Stein." (Bea Arthur who played the original Vera
Charles on Broadway, recreated the same role for the 1974 film version of the
musical.) In the 1998 Latin American literary classic "Yo-Yo Boing!", novelist Giannina
Braschi pays homage to Stein as an imaginary mentor. In 2005,
playwright/actor Jade Esteban Estrada portrayed Stein in the solo musical ICONS:
The Lesbian and Gay History of the World, Vol. 1 at Princeton University. "Loving
Repeating" is a musical by Stephen Flaherty based on the writings of Gertrude Stein.
Stein and Alice B. Toklas are both characters in the eight person show. Stein is a

10

central character in Nick Bertozzi's 2007 graphic novel The Salon. The
posthumously-published Journals of Ayn Rand contain several highly hostile
references to Gertrude Stein. From Rand's working notes for her novel The
Fountainhead, it is clear that the character Lois Cook in that book was intended as a
caricature of Stein. Stein was also portrayed in the 2011 Woody Allen film Midnight in
Paris by Kathy Bates. Her name is added to a list of great artists and notables in the
popular Broadway musical "Rent" in the song "La Vie Boheme". Also mentioned in
the Astaire - Rogers 1935 film Top Hat. She is mentioned in the song Roseability by
the Scottish rock group Idlewild. Composer Ricky Ian Gordon's and librettist Royce
Vavrek's opera 27 about Stein and Toklas premiered at Opera Theatre of St. Louis in
June 2014 with Stephanie Blythe as Stein.[115]
I tried in Making of Americans to make any one one.
Gertrude Stein
Socially reflexive subjectivity is what The Making of Americans is about and what it makes as well.
Seeing the work in terms of such a social reproduction of subjectivity, however, is very different from
the canonical view of The Making of Americans' epochal horizon shift, its move from social narration to
material textuality at the emergence of American modernism. Stein did an injustice to her work in
retrospectively accounting for it in Composition as Explanation as "a thousand pages of a continuous
present." At the very least she discouraged generations of readers from experiencing it even on those
terms. In order to make a claim for her "genius" as univocal author of The Making of
Americans (necessary, in turn, for her account of it as a "masterpiece"), Stein described its
monumental form as a continuous "beginning again and again" that proceeds by "included everything"
(CAE, 458). By this, she could incorporate in her masterpiece the false starts and revisions of the first
sections, the changes of horizon as she worked through her scientistic project of observing and
categorizing types of personality, and the final meditations on identity and nonidentity, being and time
with which she draws the work to provisional closure. Along the way, the work proceeds through a
series of what I term "horizon shifts" of its own historical understanding, in which its initial
developmental narrative is transformed, in a careful sequence of revisions, into the horizon of
language that Stein would later call the "continuous present" (CAE, 458).
To do justice to the micropolitics of Stein's textual unfolding, a close reading of The Making of
Americans is necessary, even as it risks taking up as much textual space as the work itself in an
analysis interminable of Stein's thematic and formal development. What follows, therefore, will be a
discussion of a sequence of key passages in the work's opening sections to show how a notion of
social subjectivity is articulated in its unfolding horizons of narration and self-consciousness. These
passages describe a movement from Stein's famous opening Oedipal anecdote, in which "I did not
drag my father beyond this tree," toward social horizons in which the character of the father is
distributed through multiple characteristics that form the basis of a social typology to be worked
through over the hundreds of pages that follow. Stein's crucial rewriting of the Oedipal mother in terms
of a social matrix allows her successfully to develop a non-Oedipal model of social subjectivity. This
reading will attempt to demonstrate how Stein's masterpiece, in her terms and arguably as well in
ours, is a social text in which processes of identification and loss are worked through in a narrative of
family history. What results are not only Stein's famous style of metalinguistic repetition but also a
poetics of identity as a construction in which, as in her title, Americans are made.

1.
Stein's opening gambit in The Making of Americans is to offer a paradigm for the narration of the
making of Americans that ironically suggests its own negation, an overturning that will be necessary so
that its initial assumptions may be overcome:
Once an angry man dragged his father along the ground through his own orchard. "Stop!" cried the
groaning old man at last, "Stop! I did not drag my father beyond this tree."
Stein is proposing an Ur-narrative for the social reproduction of subjectivity that may be labeled the
"Oedipal anecdote." Some unpacking of Stein's paragraph is necessary to draw out the Oedipal
resonances from this admittedly comedic invocation. In this version, son succeeds father by controlling
his desire to kill him just as the father controlled his desire to kill his father before him. For Jessica
Benjamin, the continuity of these murderous impulses from father to son is the basis for the
transmission of authority in the "effort to escape the necessity of destroying the father." Crucial to this
chain of succession is the repudiation of the mother, seen as both inhibiting separation and thus
individuation and as providing...

11