Gertrude Stein was an American novelist, poet, playwright, and art collector who lived from 1874 to 1946. She is considered one of the most important writers of the early 20th century and has been credited with coining the phrase, “The Lost Generation,” to describe the American expatriate writers living in Paris during the 1920s.
The child of wealthy parents, Stein was educated at Radcliffe College in 1898 and attended the John Hopkins School of Medicine. However, she became increasingly bored and disillusioned with her studies in the male-dominated field and dropped out to follow her brother Leo to London in 1902. The following year, the two moved to Paris, where Stein spent the majority of her adult life. There, she met her partner, Alice B. Toklas, and they remained together for the rest of Stein’s life.
While in Paris, Stein and her brother established a famous literary and artistic salon at 27 rue de Fleurus. The gallery acquired paintings by Henri Manguin, Pierre Bonnard, Pablo Picasso, Paul Cézanne, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and Henri Matisse. Dedicated attendees to the Steins’ Saturday-night gatherings included Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sinclair Lewis, and Ezra Pound, among other notable writers.
Stein has contributed dozens of titles to the literary canon but is most widely known for The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, which told the story of the couple from Alice’s point of view and helped the public know and understand Stein better. The publication was mass-marketed, and Stein enjoyed a six-month lecture tour back in the United States to promote it. She headed back to Paris in 1935 a celebrity, with the Chicago Daily Tribune proclaiming, "No writer in years has been so widely discussed, so much caricatured, so passionately championed."
In addition to writing poetry and novels, Stein also wrote plays and operas – and gave many lectures. She was eccentric but not unconfident. “Einstein was the creative philosophic mind of the century, and I have been the creative literary mind of the century,” she once said. She passed away in 1946 at the age of 72 after surgery for stomach cancer that proved to be inoperable.