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Gertrude Stein was a key figure in the development of modernism in both letters and in art. She was larger than life and probably is better known for her personality and her patronage of the arts than she is for the literature that she wrote.
Born on February 3rd, 1874, into a wealthy merchant family in Allegheny, Pennsylvania, Gertrude Stein spent much of her early life in Europe before settling in Oakland, California. She went to medical school at Johns Hopkins and either she flunked out or she quit. She liked to say she quit.
And then she became a writer. She left America and she and her brother Leo went to France in 1903, where they started collecting art. And then Gertrude and her brother Leo opened up a salon where all the people who were then nobody and who were now rich somebodies came.
Stein was not only a patron of the artists such as Picasso, she also collected writers and she set up a weekly at home in which artists and writers could come, bring their friends. Many of the 20th century's greatest writers such as T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, and F. Scott Fitzgerald were regulars at Gertrude Stein's artistic salon.
Also in attendance was Stein's lifelong companion and lover, Alice B. Toklas. Alice B. Toklas came to Paris in 1907 and met Stein, who was then living with her brother Leo, and they fell madly in love. They became lifelong companions. Alice B. Toklas was her wife and they played very traditional roles.
Stein wrote a number of works in the early 1900s but had her only commercial literary success with the publication of *The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas* in 1933. A year later, she went on a lecture tour in America. When Gertrude Stein returned to America, literally her name was up in lights. She had press conferences. She was that big of a celebrity.
Stein died on July 27th, 1946, in Nice, France, from stomach cancer.
I think Gertrude Stein's legacy is one, her famous salon in Paris. Two, she helped and nurtured young artists and writers. And three, she's a central, sort of larger-than-life figure in the first half of the 20th century. The artistic and literary histories of Paris in the 20th century wouldn't be the same without her.