Gertrude Stein

The Stein family emigrated from Germany to the U.S. in 1941. Daniel Stein and Amelia Keyser met and fell in love in 1864. They had seven children. One of their children, Gertrude Stein, was born on February 3, 1874. Her father thought of Gertrude as �a perfect baby’.

Stein вЂ" who hated school вЂ" never graduated, but by the time she was eighteen, she was an exceedingly smart individual. In 1891, Leo began to go to Harvard and Michael decided to have the ladies live with their aunt, which was a wonderful idea because that is when Stein began to feel better about her but she missed Leo too much. So she went to visit him and at the time, the University had a professor called William James, who wrote the book Principles of Psychology. He was an excellent professor and he was also the reason Stein enrolled in at the Harvard Annex in 1893.

Stein and Toklas first met in 1907, at Stein’s sister-in-law party, they felt an instant connection from that moment on. Stein would be telling stories about Paris and it caught Toklas’s interest. Toklas left her boring San Francisco life as a housewife to her brothers and father to go to Paris and live with Stein. They both agreed that they wanted to live a life worth living with plenty of food, the company of artists and writers, and not to do things they didn’t want to do. Stein and Toklas lived that life for 39 years. To make their relationship official, Stein proposed to Toklas while on a trip to Tuscany. They lived has husband and wife. As quoted by Diana Souhami, “she with a sheet if linen and he with a sheet of paper”. Stein and Toklas used to scatter love notes around the house signed Dear Dear and Your Dear. Stein had many private references to her love for Toklas. The ones who were mutual friends to the couple thought that they real good friends but they were lovers.

In the 1920s, she tried to connect her theories of cubism to literature, like in the essay Composition As Explanation. In 1925, The Making if Americans: Being a History of a Family’s Progress was published, but it was written between 1906 and 1911. After World War I, she still maintained her salon at 27 Rue de Fleurus, which attracted many of the great writers of that time such as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and Sherwood Anderson. She has been credited with coining the term, “lost generation” for some the expatriate American writers. She became Ernest Hemingway’s mentor and when his son was born, he asked Gertrude to be the godmother. In 1933, Stein published a book entitled Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, which made her get a lot of fame. In that same year, Stein and Toklas took a lecture tour in the United States. Gertrude decided to try something new and wrote two librettos of an opera which was named Four Saints in Three Acts and The Mother of all of Us. When Stein and Toklas came back from America, they went to their country home in Bilging to get some privacy from the new found celebrity status Stein had gained. In 1937, Stein found out that the landlord did not want to renew the lease because the landlord’s son wanted to move into the apartment. Stein and Toklas moved to another apartment on Germain Street in Paris. Before World War II began, Stein made an opinion saying that Adolf Hitler should be awarded the Noble Peace Prize. “I say that Hitler ought to have the peace prize, because he is removing all the elements of contest and of struggle from Germany. By driving out the Jews and the democratic and Left element, he is driving out everything that conduces to activity. That means peace by suppressing Jews, he was ending struggle in Germany”. Later, she commented on Hitler, Mussolini, and Roosevelt, “There is too much fathering going on just now and there is no doubt about it fathers are depressing".

Her Work

Between the years 1909 and 1947, Stein has written over fifteen different works, which include plays, “word-portraits”, poems and novels. A few of her best known novels would include Three Lives which was written in 1909, Tender Buttons which was written in 1915 and The Making of Americans which was written in 1925. The Making of Americans was written about her young life in California. Stein also has written a famous quote that has been referenced in many different movies and songs. Her famous quote is as follows вЂ" “A rose is a rose is a rose is a rose”.

Out of all novels Stein has written, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas has been one of the best. According to F.W. Dupee, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas is “one of the best memoirs in American literature” (as referenced in Stein, 1993, pp. ix).

The book entitled The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas which was written by Stein seems to be thought as obvious as to what the book is about. While we read the title of this book, we initially thought the novel was written about вЂ" what else? вЂ" an autobiography about Alice B. Toklas. While reading the novel though, we realized the novel isn’t about Toklas at all. It’s actually written of a point of view that is supposed to be of Toklas’s. This novel, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas is actually about both Stein and Toklas. It’s very noticed that Stein considers herself as great and a genius, seemingly very confident.

There are seven chapters in this novel. The first is entitled “Before I came to Paris”. The second is entitled “My Arrival in Paris”, the third entitled “Gertrude Stein in Paris 1903-1907”, the fourth entitled “Gertrude Stein before she came to Paris”, the fifth simply entitled “1907-1914”, the sixth chapter entitled “The War” and the last chapter is entitled “After the War 1919-1932”.

The first chapter, “Before I came to Paris” is just Toklas introducing herself to the reader. We learn that she first met Stein’s older brother and his wife. The wife told Toklas all about her life in Paris and this convinces Toklas that Paris is where she should go. While in Paris, she meets with Stein’s brother’s wife and that’s when Toklas also meets Stein. In this chapter, Toklas mentions that while first meeting Stein, a bell had hung within her. To Toklas, this is just letting her know that she met a genius.

In the second chapter of the novel, “My Arrival in Paris”, Toklas goes to have dinner at the Stein’s