“from almost a baby on, I felt that way about it. . .”
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Gertrude Stein
Gertrude Stein was an American novelist, poet, playwright, and art collector. Born in Allegheny, Pennsylvania, and raised in Oakland, California, Stein moved to Paris in 1903, and made France her home for the remainder of her life. She hosted a Paris salon, where the leading figures of modernism in literature and art, such as Pablo Picasso, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sinclair Lewis, Ez…
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culture · American author (1874–1946) · writer · poet · art collector · salonnière · autobiographer · librettist · playwright · author · collector · also Gertrude Stein, Gertruda Staĭn, Gertruda Stein, Stein
Born 3 February 1874 · Died 27 July 1946 · Q188385
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2026· 7 entries
“s statements have an irrefutable terseness, though that terseness may conceal mystifying ambiguity such as characterized the utterances. Here, culled from an hour”
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“[T]here can be automatic movements, but not automatic writing. Writing for the normal person is too complicated an activity to be indulged in automatically.”
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Fine Books Magazine: 'The Worlds of Gertrude Stein' Opens at the Harry Ransom Center
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The Art Newspaper: New novel on Gertrude Stein paints a partial picture
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BroadwayWorld: Gertrude Stein
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The Guardian: My Year in Paris With Gertrude Stein by Deborah Levy review – wonderfully entertaining
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2025· 3 entries
The New Republic: Gertrude Stein’s Preparations for the Afterlife
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The Guardian: Gertrude Stein: an Afterlife by Francesca Wade – how a literary legend was made
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Yahoo: She was derided as a charlatan – but was Gertrude Stein a genius?
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2024· 1 entry
The Guardian: Where to start with: Gertrude Stein
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2022· 1 entry
The Guardian: The Marriage of Alice B Toklas by Gertrude Stein review – upstaged by wedding guests
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2021· 1 entry
Hyperallergic: Objects that Help Tell the Story of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas’s Romance
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2020· 1 entry
The Guardian: How a book by Gertrude Stein taught me to write about myself | Deborah Levy
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2015· 1 entry
The Guardian: Poem of the week: Colored Hats by Gertrude Stein
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2014· 1 entry
Stein was one of the inaugural honorees in the Rainbow Honor Walk, a walk of fame in San Francisco's Castro neighborhood noting LGBTQ people who have "made significant contributions in their fields"
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2011· 2 entries
Four Saints in Three Acts: Four live presentations of a new production, San Francisco: Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, August 18–21, 2011, archived from the original on March 21, 2012, retrieved July 4, 2011
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NPR: Gertrude Stein Through Artists' Eyes
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2006· 1 entry
Theatre director/actor Luiz Päetow created his solo, Plays, portraying Stein's 1934 homonymous lecture, and toured Brazil for several years
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2005· 2 entries
Playwright/actor Jade Esteban Estrada portrayed Stein in the solo musical ICONS: The Lesbian and Gay History of the World, Vol
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With words "here" and "there" in all-capitals marking the border between the cities of Berkeley and Oakland
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2004· 1 entry
Retrieved March 8, 2004, featuring a reading of If I Told Him: A Completed Portrait of Picasso and A Valentine to Sherwood Anderson
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1995· 1 entry
A new, definitive edition was published by Dalkey Archive Press with a foreword by William Gass
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1982· 1 entry
On PBS, Stein was portrayed by Pat Carroll in the one-woman play Gertrude Stein, Gertrude Stein, Gertrude Stein by Marty Martin
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1976· 1 entry
“The Frank Muir Book; An irreverent companion to social history”
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1967· 1 entry
“or you can be modern, but you can”
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1950· 1 entry
As Things as They Are), written in 1903 and suppressed by the author
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1947· 1 entry
With an introduction by Thornton Wilder, Four in America creates alternative biographies of Ulysses S
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1946· 13 entries
Died 1946-07-27.
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At the age of 72 after surgery for stomach cancer at the American Hospital in Neuilly-sur-Seine, near Paris
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Stein was operated on for what proved to be inoperable stomach cancer and died before coming out of anesthesia
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“Generally speaking anybody is more interesting doing nothing than doing something. (ang.)”
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“I've been rich and I've been poor. It's better to be rich.”
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“We are always the same age inside.”
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“Before one is successful that is before any one is ready to pay money for anything you do then you are certain that every word you have written is an important word to have written and that any word you have written is as important as any other word and you keep everything you have written with great care. (ang.)”
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“It is funny the two things most men are proudest of is the thing that any man can do and doing does in the same way, that is being drunk and being the father of their son. (ang.)”
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“As there was never any question there was never any answer. (ang.)”
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“Counting is the religion of this generation it is its hope and its salvation.”
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“Communists are people who fancied that they had an unhappy childhood.”
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“Everybody knows if you are too careful you are so occupied in being careful that you are sure to stumble over something. (ang.)”
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“If anything is a surprise then there is not much difference between older and younger because the only thing that does make anybody older is that they cannot be surprised. (ang.)”
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1945· 1 entry
In a preface for the first exhibition of Spanish painter Francisco Riba Rovira (who painted a portrait of her), Stein wrote:I explained that for me, all modern painting is based on what Cézanne nearly made, instead of ba
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1944· 1 entry
Stein wrote that Pétain's policies were "really wonderful so simple so natural so extraordinary"
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1941· 1 entry
At Faÿ's suggestion, Stein consented to translate into English some 180 pages of speeches made by Marshal Philippe Pétain
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1940· 1 entry
“it would be awfully uncomfortable and I am fussy about my food.”
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1938· 2 entries
On Benito Mussolini, Adolf Hitler, Franklin D
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Stein and Toklas moved from the rue de Fleurus to 5 rue Christine in the 6th arrondissement
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1935· 1 entry
“The Superstitions of Fred Anneday, Annday, Anday; a Novel of Real Life”
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1934· 1 entry
But the full version remained out of print until Something Else Press republished it in 1966
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1933· 3 entries
After coming to San Francisco on a book tour
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Stein published a quasi-memoir of her Paris years, The Autobiography of Alice B
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Asking her to explain the rose quotation received a reply from Toklas as her secretary: "The device rose is a rose is a rose is a rose means just that
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1932· 2 entries
Stein asserted: "Painting now after its great period has come back to be a minor art
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Using an accessible style to appeal to a wider audience, she wrote The Autobiography of Alice B
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1926· 1 entry
And he became her "dearest friend during her life", according to Alice B
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1925· 1 entry
The Paris-based Contact Press published a limited run of the novel consisting of 500 copies
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1923· 1 entry
Is now in the collection of the Whitney Museum
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1914· 2 entries
Caused a great dispute between Mabel Dodge Luhan and Stein, because Mabel had been working to have it published by another publisher
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Stein continued to collect examples of Picasso's art, which had turned to Cubism, a style Leo did not appreciate
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1913· 1 entry
"the first avant-garde art exhibition in the US"
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1911· 1 entry
Mildred Aldrich introduced Stein to Mabel Dodge Luhan and they began a short-lived but fruitful friendship during which the wealthy Mabel Dodge promoted Gertrude's legend in the United States
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1908· 2 entries
Summered in Fiesole, Italy, Toklas staying with Harriet Lane Levy, the companion of her trip from the United States, and her housemate until Alice moved in with Stein and Leo in 1910
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“[h]e was the first one that ever printed anything that I had done. And you can imagine what that meant to me or to any one.”
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1907· 2 entries
On Toklas's first day in Paris, at Sarah and Michael Stein's apartment
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With Harriet Levy, with Toklas maintaining living arrangements with Levy until she moved to 27 Rue de Fleurus in 1910
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1906· 1 entry
Picasso completed Portrait of Gertrude Stein, which remained in her collection until her death
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1904· 2 entries
30-year-old Gertrude "had evidently determined that the 'small hard reality' of her life would be writing"
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Stein began Fernhurst, a fictional account of a scandalous three-person romantic affair involving a dean (M
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1903· 1 entry
And made France her home for the remainder of her life
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1902· 2 entries
Stein's brother Leo Stein left for London, and Gertrude followed
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Facilitating their introduction to Paul Cézanne and the dealer Ambroise Vollard
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1899· 2 entries
Or 1900, she became infatuated with Mary Bookstaver who was involved in a relationship with a medical student, Mabel Haynes
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Stein gave a controversial speech titled "The Value of College Education for Women", undoubtedly designed to provoke the largely middle-class audience
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1897· 1 entry
Stein spent the summer in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, studying embryology at the Marine Biological Laboratory
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1892· 1 entry
Arranged for Gertrude and their sister, Bertha, to live with their mother's family in Baltimore
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1878· 1 entry
Settling in Oakland, California, where her father became director of San Francisco's streetcar lines, the Market Street Railway
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1874· 2 entries
Born 1874-02-03.
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In Allegheny, Pennsylvania (which merged with Pittsburgh in 1907), to upper-middle-class Jewish parents, Daniel Stein and Amelia Stein, née Keyser
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