Happy Birthday, Gertrude Stein

Born February 3, 1874, Allegheny, PA | Died July 27, 1946, Neuilly-sur-Seine, France

Today, the Best American Essays newsletter celebrates Gertrude Stein, an avant-garde expatriate writer of prose, verse, and drama, on the 151st anniversary of her birth. Stein, who studied with William James, went to medical school on his advice, and left to become a writer and avid art collector who hosted salons in her adopted city of Paris.

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Gertrude Stein with her brothers Leo (left) and Michael (right), circa 1906, photographer unknown

“After all everybody, that is, everybody who writes is interested in living inside themselves in order to tell what is inside themselves. That is why writers have to have two countries, the one where they belong and the one in which they live really. The second one is romantic, it is separate from themselves, it is not real but it is really there.”

Gertrude Stein, Carl Van Vechten, 1934.

“Narrative concerns itself with what is happening all the time, history concerns itself with what happens from time to time. And that is perhaps what is the matter with history and that is what is perhaps the matter with narrative.”

The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933) is an experimental memoir of Stein’s Paris years, written in the voice of Alice B. Toklas, her life partner. The book became a literary bestseller, bringing mainstream attention to Stein’s work. Everybody’s Autobiography (1937) is the continuation of the memoir project. Paris, France (1940), published the day France fell to the Nazis, blends Stein's childhood memories with a commentary on French people and culture.

First published nonfiction works:

• with Leon Solomons, “Normal Motor Automatism,” The Psychological Review, 1896.

• “Cultivated Motor Automatism: A Study of Character in its Relation to Attention,” The Psychological Review, 1898.

Select nonfiction bibliography:

• Gertrude Stein: Writings 1903-1932, edited by Catherine Stimpson and Harriet Chessman (Library of America, 1998).

• Gertrude Stein: Writings 1932-1946, edited by Catherine Stimpson and Harriet Chessman (Library of America, 1998).

• “What Are Master-pieces and Why Are There So Few of Them?,” delivered as a lecture at Oxford and Cambridge, 1936; reprinted in The Best American Essays of the Century, edited by Robert Atwan and Joyce Carol Oates (HarperCollins, 2000).

• “Composition as Explanation,” lecture delivered at Oxford College, 1925-26; published by the Hogarth Press, 1926; reprinted on the Poetry Foundation website.

See also:

Visit Gertrude Stein in Circles: Spheres of Life and Writing, George Peabody Library, John Hopkins University, through March 2, 2025.

Visit Radio Free Stein, a project that stages the plays of Gertrude Stein in the medium of recorded sound.

Visit Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas papers at Yale University.

Visit Gertrude Stein and her Circle papers at University of Maryland.

Visit the Gertrude Stein collection at the Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas, Austin.

Watch When This You See, Remember Me, a documentary by Perry Miller Adato, 1970.

Listen to Stein reading her work at this archive of recordings at the University of Pennsylvania.

Read “Gertrude Stein’s ‘Composition as Explanation’,” Caroline Hagood, The Kenyon Review blog, 2019.

Read “Gertrude Stein: Letters to a Friend,” The Paris Review, 1986.