Gertrude Stein

Gertrude Stein was an American author, poet, dramatist, and art collector. Stein was born in Allegheny, Pennsylvania (now part of Pittsburgh) and raised in Oakland, California. In 1903, she relocated to Paris and lived there for the rest of her life. She hosted a Paris salon where important modernist luminaries in literature and art, including Pablo Picasso, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sinclair Lewis, Ezra Pound, Sherwood Anderson, and Henri Matisse, would gather. Stein's quasi...See more

Gertrude Stein was an American author, poet, dramatist, and art collector. Stein was born in Allegheny, Pennsylvania (now part of Pittsburgh) and raised in Oakland, California. In 1903, she relocated to Paris and lived there for the rest of her life. She hosted a Paris salon where important modernist luminaries in literature and art, including Pablo Picasso, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sinclair Lewis, Ezra Pound, Sherwood Anderson, and Henri Matisse, would gather. Stein's quasi-memoir of her Paris years, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, was published in 1933 and written in the voice of her life partner, Alice B. Toklas. Stein, the youngest of five children, was born on February 3, 1874, in Allegheny, Pennsylvania (which merged with Pittsburgh in 1907), to upper-middle-class Jewish parents Daniel Stein and Amelia Stein (née Keyser). Her father was a wealthy businessman who owned real estate. They talked German and English at home. Gertrude's siblings included Michael (1865), Simon (1868), Bertha (1870), and Leo (1872). See less