Gertrude Stein

Gertrude Stein (1874–1946) was an American writer, art collector, and salonnière whose Paris apartment at 27 rue de Fleurus became the meeting ground for early-twentieth-century modernism. Her experimental prose, including Tender Buttons (1914) and The Making of Americans (1925), pushed English syntax toward the conditions of Cubist painting.

Born in Allegheny, Pennsylvania, to a wealthy German-Jewish family and raised in Oakland and Vienna, Stein studied psychology under William James at Radcliffe and attended Johns Hopkins Medical School before leaving without a degree. She moved to Paris in 1903 to live with her brother Leo, and from 1907 with her partner Alice B. Toklas, who remained with her until Stein's death.

The Steins bought Cézannes, Matisses, and Picassos when those painters were unknown, and the Saturday-evening salons drew Picasso, Matisse, Braque, Apollinaire, and later Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Sherwood Anderson, and Thornton Wilder. Picasso's 1906 portrait of Stein, painted in some ninety sittings, hangs in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Her commercial breakthrough came with The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933), narrated in Toklas's voice but written by Stein, followed by a triumphant 1934–35 American lecture tour and the opera Four Saints in Three Acts with composer Virgil Thomson. She remained in occupied France during World War II, sheltered in the Bugey region by neighbors who never reported her Jewish identity, and died in Paris of stomach cancer.

The name Gertrude is of Old High German origin, from gēr (spear) and drūd (strength), and was carried into wide use by the medieval mystic Saint Gertrude the Great. She inhabited the etymology in her own register: a woman whose strength was her sentence and whose spear was the comma she refused to use.