,PARA $PAR@ ` ΣTEXT ` ╓Stein, Gertrude1874╨1946writer and criticBorn on February 3, 1874, in Allegheny, Pennsylvania, Gertrude Stein was of a somewhat unsettled family. After periods in Austria and Paris, she grew up in Oakland, California. On the deaths of her parents in 1888 and 1891 she was left with a modest income. She attended the Society for the Collegiate Instruction of Women (from 1894 Radcliffe College), where she studied psychology under William James, in 1893╨1897 (she received a degree in 1898) and the Johns Hopkins Medical School from 1897 to 1902. With her older brother Leo she moved in 1902 to London and in 1903 to Paris. There she and Leo quickly began collecting the works of such modern painters as Matisse, Picasso, CÄzanne, Gauguin, Rousseau, Braque, Gris, and Manet. Their remarkable perspicacity and determination enabled them to amass a considerable collection, and that in turn served as the germ of what soon became the most famous salon in Paris. Her home later became famous also as the center of the American literary expatriate movement of the 1920s; she dubbed its members the ╥lost generation╙ and was quoted to that effect in the epigraph to Ernest Hemingway╒s The Sun Also Rises. Those who frequented her home included Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sherwood Anderson, Wyndham Lewis, AndrÄ Gide, Carl Van Vechten, Ezra Pound, Ford Madox Ford, Paul Robeson, Clive Bell, John Reed, Elliot Paul, and Jo Davidson. Stein╒s writing, for which she seemed to wish to be most remembered, was as often as not baffling but to many readers fascinating nevertheless. Concerned with sound and the rhythm of words rather than with their conventional meanings, her prose style was, she claimed, a literary counterpart of abstraction or cubism in painting. A famous phrase, ╥Pigeons in the grass alas,╙ was from her libretto for the opera Four Saints in Three Acts (which neither concerned four saints nor was presented in three acts), with music by Virgil Thomson, first produced in the United States in 1934 and many times revived. Her books included Three Lives, 1909, Tender Buttons, 1914, The Making of Americans, completed in 1911 but published, with Hemingway╒s help, in 1925, Lucy Church Amiably, 1930, Before the Flowers of Friendship Faded Friendship Faded, 1931, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, 1933, which was in reality her own autobiography rather than that of Toklas (her secretary and companion from 1912, when she and Leo parted), Everybody╒s Autobiography, 1937, and Ida, a Novel, 1941. Among her critical and other nonfiction works were Composition as Explanation, 1926, How to Write, 1931, Narration, 1935, The Geographical History of America, 1936, Picasso, 1938, Paris France, 1940, Wars I Have Seen, 1945, and Brewsie and Willie, concerning her friendships with young American servicemen in World War II, 1946. A second collaboration with Virgil Thompson produced the opera Mother of Us All, 1947, based on the life of Susan B. Anthony. During World War I Gertrude Stein imported a Ford motor van and enrolled herself and Toklas as an ambulance unit of the American Fund for French Wounded. In later years she and Toklas divided their time between Paris and Bilignin. Her only visit to America came in 1934, when she made a lecture tour in the wake of the success of Four Saints. She was not modest in her self-estimation: ╥Einstein was the creative philosophic mind of the century, and I have been the creative literary mind of the century.╙ She died in Paris on July 27, 1946. styl ` @ ! ¬ 5¬ 5¬ - !I ╦ 5¬ ╠ !I ¿ !I ║ !I Ñ 5¬ ª !I D !I ^ !I 5¬
