Stein, Gertrude (1874–1946)

US writer. She influenced authors Ernest Hemingway, Sherwood Anderson, and F Scott Fitzgerald with her radical prose style. Drawing on the stream-of-consciousness psychology of William James and on the geometry of Cézanne and the cubist painters in Paris, she evolved a ‘continuous present’ style made up of constant repetition and variation of simple phrases. Her work includes the self-portrait The Autobiography of Alice B Toklas (1933).

Born in Allegheny, Pennsylvania, Stein went to Paris in 1903 after medical school at Johns Hopkins University and lived there, writing and collecting art, for the rest of her life. She settled in with her brother, also a patron of the arts, and a companion/secretary, Alice B Toklas (1877–1967), and in her home she held court to a ‘lost generation’ of expatriate US writers and modern artists (Picasso, Matisse, Braque, Gris). She also wrote Three Lives (1910), The Making of Americans (1925), Composition as Explanation (1926), Tender Buttons (1914), Mrs Reynolds (1952), and the operas (with composer Virgil Thomson) Four Saints in Three Acts (1929) and The Mother of Us All (1947). A tour of the USA in 1934 resulted in Everybody's Autobiography (1937).