Gertrude Stein

Born in Allegheny, Pennsylvania, in 1874, Gertude Stein was the grandchild of Jewish immigrants from Lower Franconia. She studied at Radcliffe College in Cambridge (Massachusetts) and at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in Baltimore and moved in with her brother Leo in Paris the following year. The couple's house became a social centre for the Parisian avant-garde. Stein met her partner Alice B. Toklas in 1907. In the 1920s and 1930s, Ernest Hemingway, Ezra Pound, Thornton Wilder, T. S. Eliot, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Edith Sitwell, Jean Cocteau and Tristan Tzara, among others, came and went at Stein's salon. Stein's main work, the novel The Making of Americans, written between 1903 and 1911, was published in Paris in 1925. Her opera libretti Four Saints in Three Acts and The Mother of Us All were set to music by Virgil Thompson in 1928 and 1946 respectively. During the Second World War, Stein and Toklas lived in seclusion in the French department of Ain. The couple returned to Paris in December 1944. Gertude Stein died of stomach cancer in Neuilly-sur-Seine in 1946.