(b. Feb. 3, 1874, Allegheny, Pa., U.S.--d. July 27, 1946, Paris),
avant-garde American writer, eccentric, and self-styled genius,
whose Paris home was a salon for the leading artists and writers
of the period between World Wars I and II.
Stein spent her infancy in Vienna and Paris and her girlhood in
Oakland, Calif. At Radcliffe College she studied psychology with the
philosopher William James. After further study at Johns Hopkins
medical school she went to Paris, where she was able to live by
private means. From 1903 to 1912 she lived with her brother Leo,
who became an accomplished art critic; thereafter she lived with
her lifelong companion Alice B. Toklas (1877-1967).
Stein and her brother were among the first collectors of works by the
Cubists and other experimental painters of the period, such as Pablo
Picasso (who painted her portrait), Henri Matisse, and Georges Braque
, several of whom became her friends. At her salon they mingled with
expatriate American writers, such as Sherwood Anderson and Ernest
Hemingway, and other visitors drawn by her literary reputation. Her
literary and artistic judgments were revered, and her chance remarks
could make or destroy reputations. In her own work, she attempted to
parallel the theories of Cubism, specifically in her concentration on
the illumination of the present moment and her use of slightly varied
repetitions and extreme simplification and fragmentation. The best
explanation of her theory of writing is found in the essay Composition
and Explanation, which is based on lectures that she gave at the
universities of Oxford and Cambridge and was issued as a book in 1926.
Among her work that was most thoroughly influenced by Cubism is
Tender Buttons (1914), which carries fragmentation and abstraction
beyond the borders of intelligibility.
Her first published book, Three Lives (1909), the stories of three
working-class women, has been called a minor masterpiece. The Making
of Americans, a long composition written in 1906-08 but not published
until 1925, was too convoluted and obscure for general readers, for
whom she remained essentially the author of such lines as "A rose is
a rose is a rose is a rose." Her only book to reach a wide public was
The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933), actually Stein's own
autobiography. The performance in the United States of her Four Saints
in Three Acts (1934), which the composer Virgil Thomson had made into
an opera, led to a triumphal American lecture tour in 1934-35. Thomson
also wrote the music for her second opera, The Mother of Us All
(published 1947), based on the life of feminist Susan B. Anthony.
Stein became a legend in Paris, especially after surviving the German
occupation of France and befriending the many young American servicemen
who visited her. She wrote about these soldiers in Brewsie and Willie
(1946).
Document URL: http://www.english.upenn.edu/~afilreis/88/stein-bio.html