The Oxford Companion to American Literature | Stein, Gertrude
Stein, Gertrude( 1874–1946), born in Pennsylvania, was educated abroad, at California schools, and graduated from Radcliffe (1897). She was stimulated at college by William James, and her psychological experiments led her to study the anatomy of the brain at Johns Hopkins. Tiring of scientific work, she went abroad (1902), where she lived until her death, her salon in France attracting prominent writers as well as painters, particularly Matisse, Picasso, and Juan Gris, whose works she collected. Her early fiction, including Three Lives (1909), stories of two servant girls and an unhappy black woman; The Making of Americans (1925); and A Long Gay Book (1932), shows a breakdown of traditional plot structure and discursive writing, and dependence upon intuitive means of expressing the actual present.
Her later writings include Tender Buttons (1914), poetry without conventional logic or grammar, intended to...
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