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This portal discusses resources related to:
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LITERATURE
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MODERNISM
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LGBTQ HISTORY
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WOMEN WRITERS
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PLAYWRITING
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POETRY
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PARIS
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1920S
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1930S
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WORLD WAR I
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WORLD WAR II
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QUEER HISTORY
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I am:
A Woman
A Writer
A Jew
A Lesbian
A Modernist
A Salonniste
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My life and times:
I was born on February 3, 1874 in Allegheny, a neighborhood of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. I grew up in Oakland, California, attended Radcliffe College, then took classes at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. My older brother, Leo, moved to Paris, France in 1903 and I followed him there, then stayed for the remainder of my life.
I met Alice Babette Toklas, who was also from California, in 1907 and we were a couple for nearly 40 years.
I passed away on July 27, 1946
The entry for me in the Encyclopedia Britannica provides more details (though you will note that the first sentence of the profile identifies me as ” … avant-garde American writer, eccentric, and self-styled genius …”
My profile on the website of the Poetry Foundation reads as more sympathetic to one whose life and work are not easily defined.
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My creative work:
I began writing when I was young and continued throughout my entire life. I wrote novels, plays, poems, word portraits, books for children, essays, and two volumes of autobiography.
The second book I published was Tender Buttons, in 1914.
It begins:
A CARAFE, THAT IS A BLIND GLASS.
A kind in glass and a cousin, a spectacle and nothing strange a single hurt color and an arrangement in a system to pointing. All this and not ordinary, not unordered in not resembling. The difference is spreading.
GLAZED GLITTER.
Nickel, what is nickel, it is originally rid of a cover.
The change in that is that red weakens an hour. The change has come. There is no search. But there is, there is that hope and that interpretation and sometime, surely any is unwelcome, sometime there is breath and there will be a sinecure and charming very charming is that clean and cleansing. Certainly glittering is handsome and convincing.
There is no gratitude in mercy and in medicine. There can be breakages in Japanese. That is no programme. That is no color chosen. It was chosen yesterday, that showed spitting and perhaps washing and polishing. It certainly showed no obligation and perhaps if borrowing is not natural there is some use in giving.
You can read more here.
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My legacy:
My work was not well-received during my lifetime, although The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, published in 1933 and followed by a speaking tour I gave in the United States, sold well and brought my work to a much larger group of readers.
My work has been republished, debated, analyzed, and taught for over 100 years.
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My publications:
Here is the Name Authority as established for me by the library of Congress for cataloguing books I wrote.
Books available to read on the Internet Archive
Books in the Yale University Library
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My story has not yet been fully told, so feel free to explore my papers and related archives:
Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas papers
Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas collection
Robert Bartlett Haas collection on Gertrude Stein and the Conference Press
Other archives that include informaiton about me.
Records for archival materials in ORBIS, the Yale Library catalog