Gertrude Stein

Gertrude Stein

<p>Gertrude Stein was born in 1874 in Allegheny, Pennsylvania ( "Gender ). She is known as an avant-garde American writer, whose Paris home was a salon for the leading artists and writers of the period between World Wars I and II.
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<div id="toc"><h2>Table of Contents</h2>
<ul>
<li class="toclevel-1"><a href="#w_education"><span class="tocnumber">1</span> <span class="toctext">Education</span></a></li>
<li class="toclevel-1"><a href="#w_paris-friendships-with-painters-and-writers"><span class="tocnumber">2</span> <span class="toctext">Paris: Friendships with painters and writers</span></a></li>
<li class="toclevel-1"><a href="#w_world-war-ii"><span class="tocnumber">3</span> <span class="toctext">World War II</span></a></li>
<li class="toclevel-1"><a href="#w_publications"><span class="tocnumber">4</span> <span class="toctext">Publications</span></a></li>
<li class="toclevel-1"><a href="#w_references"><span class="tocnumber">5</span> <span class="toctext">References</span></a></li>
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</div><h2 id="w_education">Education <br /></h2>
<p>Gertrude Stein attended "All-Women from 1893-1897, and studied under the psychologist William James. In 1897, Gertrude spent the summer in Woods Hole, Massachusetts studying embryology at the Marine Biological Laboratory, followed by two years at Johns Hopkins Medical School. In 1901, she left Johns Hopkins without obtaining a degree.<br />
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<h2 id="w_paris-friendships-with-painters-and-writers">Paris: Friendships with painters and writers<br /></h2>
<p>Stein and her brother were among the first collectors of works by the Cubists and other experimental painters of the period, several of whom became her friends. In 1903, Stein moved to Paris living with her brother on 23 rue de Fleurus. Her brother, Leo Stein, had become an important art critic and with their family wealth, they developed one of the earliest collections of modern art, owning early works by Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, André Derain, Georges Braque, Juan Gris, and other young painters. Before World War I, their saturday evening salons at 27 Rue de Fleurus attracted these and other artists and members of the avant garde, including Guillaume Apollinaire. Stein was also writing prolifically novels, plays, stories, libretti and poems.
</p><p>Just before the outbreak of World War I, Stein met Alice B. Toklas, who was to become her life-long partner.<br />
</p><p>In the 1920s, her salon at 27 Rue de Fleurus, with walls covered by avant-garde paintings, attracted many of the great writers of the time, including Ernest Hemingway, Ezra Pound, Thornton Wilder, and Sherwood Anderson. <br />
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<h2 id="w_world-war-ii">World War II<br /></h2>
<p>Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas rented a country home in&nbsp; Ain,&nbsp; (Rhône-Alpes), where they probably were able to escape persecution (Stein was of Jewish descent) due to their friendship with a Vichy collaborato, Bernard Faÿ. Stein returned to Paris after the war but died the year after in 1946 at Neuilly-sur-Seine of stomach cancer. She is buried at Pere Lachaise cemetary in Paris.<br />
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<h2 id="w_publications">Publications<br /></h2>
<p>Stein is the author of one of the earliest lesbian coming out stories, Q.E.D, which recounts a love triangle between three working-class women. Her only book to reach a wide public was <i><b>Th</b></i><i><b>e Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas</b></i><b>(1933), actually Stein’s own autobiography. The performance in the United States of her <i>Four Saints in Three Acts</i> (1934), which the composer Virgil Thomson had made into an opera, led to a triumphal American lecture tour in 1934-35. <br /></b>
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<h2 id="w_references">References<br /></h2>
<ul><li><a href="http://www.writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/88/stein-bio.html" alt="Gertrude Stein – brief biography">Gertrude Stein – brief biography</a> <br />
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