Gertrude Stein Popular Books
Gertrude Stein Biography & Facts
Gertrude Stein (February 3, 1874 – July 27, 1946) was an American novelist, poet, playwright, and art collector. Born in Allegheny, Pennsylvania (now part of Pittsburgh), and raised in Oakland, California, Stein moved to Paris in 1903, and made France her home for the remainder of her life. She hosted a Paris salon, where the leading figures of modernism in literature and art, such as Pablo Picasso, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sinclair Lewis, Ezra Pound, Sherwood Anderson and Henri Matisse, would meet. In 1933, Stein published a quasi-memoir of her Paris years, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, written in the voice of Alice B. Toklas, her life partner. The book became a literary bestseller and vaulted Stein from the relative obscurity of the cult-literature scene into the limelight of mainstream attention. Two quotes from her works have become widely known: "Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose", and "there is no there there", with the latter often taken to be a reference to her childhood home of Oakland. Her books include Q.E.D. (1903), about a lesbian romantic affair involving several of Stein's friends; Fernhurst, a fictional story about a love triangle; Three Lives (1905–06); The Making of Americans (1902–1911); and Tender Buttons (1914). Her activities during World War II have been the subject of analysis and commentary. As a Jew living in Nazi-occupied France, Stein may have only been able to sustain her lifestyle as an art collector, and indeed to ensure her physical safety, through the protection of the powerful Vichy government official and Nazi collaborator Bernard Faÿ. After the war ended, Stein expressed admiration for another Nazi collaborator, Vichy leader Marshal Pétain. Early life Stein, the youngest of a family of five children, was born on February 3, 1874, in Allegheny, Pennsylvania (which merged with Pittsburgh in 1907), to upper-middle-class Jewish parents, Daniel Stein and Amelia Stein, née Keyser. Her father was a wealthy businessman with real estate holdings. German and English were spoken in their home. Gertrude's siblings were: Michael (1865), Simon (1868), Bertha (1870), and Leo (1872). When Stein was three years old, she and her family moved to Vienna, and then Paris. Accompanied by governesses and tutors, the Steins endeavored to imbue their children with the cultured sensibilities of European history and life. After a year-long sojourn abroad, they returned to America in 1878, settling in Oakland, California, where her father became director of San Francisco's streetcar lines, the Market Street Railway. Stein attended First Hebrew Congregation of Oakland's Sabbath school. During their residence in Oakland, they lived for four years on a ten-acre lot, and Stein built many memories of California there. She would often go on excursions with her brother, Leo, with whom she developed a close relationship. Stein found formal schooling in Oakland unstimulating, but she often read Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Scott, Burns, Smollett, Fielding, and more. When Stein was 14 years old, her mother died. Three years later, her father died as well. Stein's eldest brother, Michael Stein, age 26, then took over the family business holdings, moved his four siblings to San Francisco, where he now was a director of the Market Street Cable Railway Company, and in 1892 arranged for Gertrude and another sister, Bertha, to live with their mother's family in Baltimore. Here she lived with her uncle David Bachrach, who in 1877 had married Gertrude's maternal aunt, Fanny Keyser. In Baltimore, Stein met Claribel and Etta Cone, who held Saturday evening salons that she would later emulate in Paris. The Cones shared an appreciation for art and conversation about it and modeled a domestic division of labor that Stein would replicate in her relationship with Alice B. Toklas. Education Radcliffe Stein attended Radcliffe College, then an annex of Harvard University, from 1893 to 1897 and was a student of psychologist William James. With James's supervision, Stein and another student, Leon Mendez Solomons, performed experiments on normal motor automatism, a phenomenon hypothesized to occur in people when their attention is divided between two simultaneous intelligent activities such as writing and speaking. These experiments yielded examples of writing that appeared to represent "stream of consciousness", a psychological theory often attributed to James and the style of modernist authors Virginia Woolf and James Joyce. In 1934, behavioral psychologist B. F. Skinner interpreted Stein's difficult poem Tender Buttons as an example of normal motor automatism. In a letter Stein wrote during the 1930s, she explained that she never accepted the theory of automatic writing: "[T]here can be automatic movements, but not automatic writing. Writing for the normal person is too complicated an activity to be indulged in automatically." She did publish an article in a psychological journal on "spontaneous automatic writing" while at Radcliffe, but "the unconscious and the intuition (even when James himself wrote about them) never concerned her". At Radcliffe, she began a lifelong friendship with Mabel Foote Weeks, whose correspondence traces much of the progression of Stein's life. In 1897, Stein spent the summer in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, studying embryology at the Marine Biological Laboratory. She received her A.B. (Bachelor of Arts) magna cum laude from Radcliffe in 1898. Johns Hopkins School of Medicine William James, who had become a committed mentor to Stein at Radcliffe, recognizing her intellectual potential, and declaring her his "most brilliant woman student", encouraged Stein to enroll in medical school. Although Stein professed no interest in either the theory or practice of medicine, she enrolled at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in 1897. In her fourth year, Stein failed an important course, lost interest, and left. Ultimately, medical school had bored her, and she had spent many of her evenings not applying herself to her studies, but taking long walks and attending the opera. Stein's tenure at Johns Hopkins was marked by challenges and stress. Men dominated the medical field, and the inclusion of women in the profession was not unreservedly or unanimously welcomed. Writing of this period in her life (in Things As They Are, 1903) Stein often revealed herself as a depressed young woman dealing with a paternalistic culture, struggling to find her own identity, which she realized could not conform to the conventional female role. Her uncorseted physical appearance and eccentric mode of dress aroused comment and she was described as "Big and floppy and sandaled and not caring a damn." According to Linda Wagner-Martin, Stein's "controversial stance on women's medicine caused problems with the male faculty" and contributed to her decision to leave without finishing her degree. Asked to give a lecture to a group of Baltimore women in 1899, Stein gave a con.... Discover the Gertrude Stein popular books. Find the top 100 most popular Gertrude Stein books.
Best Seller Gertrude Stein Books of 2024
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Gertrude Stein
G.F. MitranoIn her provocative study of Gertrude Stein, G.F. Mitrano argues that Stein's particular take on modernity has special relevance for today. Tracing what she describes as Stein...
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Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein
Gertrude Stein"This collection, a retrospective exhibit of the work of a woman who created a unique place for herself in the world of letters, contains a sample of practically every period and e...
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In Our Time
Ernest HemingwayA strikingly original collection of short stories and accompanying vignettes that marked Ernest Hemingway’s American debut.When In Our Time was first published in 1925, it was wide...
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Hemingway on Fishing
Ernest HemingwayFrom childhood on, Ernest Hemingway was a passionate fisherman. He fished the lakes and creeks near the family’s summer home at Walloon Lake, Michigan, and his first stories and pi...
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Gertrude Stein
Gertrude Stein & Philip DossickTwo Classic Works by the renowned author. Three Lives consists of three stories set in the fictional town of Bridgepoint: The Good Anna, Melanctha, and The Gentle Lenastraightforwa...
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For Whom the Bell Tolls
Ernest HemingwayErnest Hemingway's masterpiece on war, love, loyalty, and honor tells the story of Robert Jordan, an antifascist American fighting in the Spanish Civil War.In 1937 Ernest Hemingway...
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Winner Take Nothing
Ernest HemingwayFourteen of some of Hemingway’s finest short stories that examine life’s different stages through Hemingway’s unique perspective.Ernest Hemingway's Winner Take Nothing contains fou...
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Gertrude Stein
Teresa Requena PelegríGertrude Stein fue una de las protagonistas de la vida cultural del París de principios del siglo XX. Como coleccionista de arte, su famoso atelier de la Rué de Fleurus, alojó much...
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Paris Without End
Gioia Diliberto“A bittersweet modern love story [that] reads as easily as a novel.” Vogue“Fascinating. . . . A detailed, grittier portrait of the woman Hemingway loved and left.” NewsdayHadley Ri...
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Charmed Circle
James R. MellowAvantgarde Paris comes to life in this "meticulous and loving reconstruction of the period" (The New York Times Book Review)On almost every Saturday of the first half of the twenti...
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Green Hills of Africa
Ernest HemingwayThe most intimate and elaborately enhanced addition to the Hemingway Library series: Hemingway’s memoir of his safari across the Serengetipresented with archival material from the ...
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Gertrude Stein
Lucy Daniel“You are, of course, never yourself,” wrote Gertrude Stein (1874–1946) in Everybody’s Autobiography. Modernist icon Stein wrote many pseudoautobiographies, including the well...
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The Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway
Ernest HemingwayThe definitive short story collection that established Ernest Hemingway's literary reputation, originally published in 1938.Ernest Hemingway is a cultural iconan archetype of rugge...
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My Queer War
James LordA powerful story of sexual awakening during the Second World War, My Queer War, from the noted memoirist and critic James Lord tells the story of a young man's exposure to the terr...
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Nick Adams Stories
Ernest HemingwayFrom one of the 20th century's greatest voices comes the complete chronological anthology of his short stories featuring Nick Adams, Ernest Hemingway's memorable character, as he g...
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A Drinkable Feast
Philip GreeneWinner of the 13th Annual Spirited Award, for Best New Book on Drinks Culture, History or SpiritsA history of the Lost Generation in 1920s Paris told through the lens of the cockta...
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The Dangerous Summer
Ernest HemingwayExperience Hemingway’s firsthand chronicle of a brutal season of bullfights in Spain.In the 1950s, Hemingway and his wife return to Spain, where Hemingway had visited before as a w...
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The Torrents of Spring
Ernest HemingwayAn early gem of satire and humor from the greatest American writer of the twentieth century.First published in 1926, The Torrents of Spring is a hilarious parody of the Chicago sch...
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To Have and Have Not
Ernest HemingwayFrom one of the best writers in American literature, a classic novel about smuggling, intrigue, and love.To Have and Have Not is the dramatic story of Harry Morgan, an honest man w...
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Thank You for the Light
F. Scott FitzgeraldThis newly discovered short story by one of the greatest writers of twentiethcentury American literature, F. Scott Fitzgerald, will surprise and delight. Thank You for the Light is...
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Of Irish Blood
Mary Pat KellyIt's 1903. Nora Kelly, twentyfour, is talented, outspoken, progressive, and climbing the ladder of opportunity, until she falls for an attractive but dangerous man who sends her ru...
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A Short Autobiography
F. Scott FitzgeraldA selfportrait of a great writer. A Short Autobiography charts Fitzgerald's progression from exuberant and cocky with "What I think and Feel at 25", to mature and reflect...
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Waiting for Gertrude
Bill RichardsonIn Paris's PereLachaise cemetery lie the bones of many renowned departed. It is also home to a large number of stray cats. Now, what if by some strange twist of fate, the souls of ...
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A Life in Letters
F. Scott FitzgeraldA vibrant selfportrait of an artist whose work was his life. In this new collection of F. Scott Fitzgerald's letters, edited by leading Fitzgerald scholar and biographer Matthew J...
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The Garden of Eden
Ernest HemingwayThe last uncompleted novel of Ernest Hemingway, published posthumously in 1986, charts the life of a young American writer and his glamorous wife who fall for the same woman.A sens...
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True at First Light
Ernest HemingwayBoth a revealing selfportrait and dramatic fictional chronicle of his final African safari, Ernest Hemingway's last unpublished work was written when he returned from Kenya in 1953...
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A Moveable Feast
Ernest HemingwayPublished for the first time as Ernest Hemingway intended, one of the great writer's most enduring works: his classic memoir of Paris in the 1920s Published posthumously in 1964, ...
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Old Man and the Sea
Ernest HemingwayThe last novel Ernest Hemingway saw published, The Old Man and the Sea has proved itself to be one of the enduring works of American fiction. It is the story of an old Cuban fisher...
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Islands in the Stream
Ernest HemingwayA later, posthumously published classic following the adventures of a painter in the midst of World War II.First published in 1970, nine years after Hemingway's death, this is the ...
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A Moveable Feast
Ernest HemingwayErnest Hemingway’s classic memoir of Paris in the 1920s, now available in a restored edition, includes the original manuscript along with insightful recollections and unfinished sk...
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The Sun Also Rises
Ernest HemingwayThe Sun Also Rises is one of the earliest and most important novels by Ernest Hemingway. The story tells of a group of British expatriates who travel to the Festival of San Fermín ...
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The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas
Gertrude SteinSelected by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best nonfiction books of all time'I always wanted to be historical,' Gertrude Stein once quipped. In 1932, Stein began writing the ...
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This Side of Paradise
F. Scott FitzgeraldThis Side of Paradise, F. Scott Fitzgerald's romantic and witty first novel, was written when the author was only twentythree years old. This semiautobiographical story of the hand...
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Outlaw Marriages
Rodger StreitmatterCelebrate LGBTQIA+ history with the engaging and untold stories of 15 prominent samesex couples who defied cultural norms and made significant contributions to the arts, theater, s...
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Gertrude Stein
Philippe Blanchon"Je me demande si je dois parler des choses dont je ne me souviens pas comme de celles dont je me souviens." Que savonsnous de Gertrude Stein (18741946) ? Qu’elle fut poétesse, éc...
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The Old Man and the Sea
Ernest HemingwayErnest Hemingway’s most beloved and popular novel ever, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, now featuring a previously unpublished short story and additional supplementary materialplus a...
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For Whom the Bell Tolls
Ernest HemingwayIntroduced by Hemingway’s grandson Seán Hemingway, this newly annotated edition and literary masterpiece about an American in the Spanish Civil War features early drafts and supple...
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Men Without Women
Ernest HemingwayClassic short stories from a master of American fiction exploring relationships, war, and sportsmanship.First published in 1927, Men Without Women represents some of Hemingway’s mo...
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Matisse Picasso and Gertrude Stein
Gertrude SteinThese early avant garde texts are written in philosophical propositions which describe the people and objects around Gertrude Stein with a narrative logic that is similar to the La...
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Picasso and the Painting That Shocked the World
Miles J. UngerOne of The Christian Science Monitor’s Best Nonfiction Books of 2018“An engrossing read…a historically and psychologically rich account of the young Picasso and his coteries in Bar...
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Save Me the Waltz
Zelda FitzgeraldSave Me the Waltz is the first and only novel by the wife of F. Scott Fitzgerald. During the years when Fitzgerald was working on Tender Is the Night, Zelda Fitzgerald was preparin...
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The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Other Stories
Ernest HemingwayThe ideal introduction to the genius of Ernest Hemingway, The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Other Stories contains ten of Hemingway's most acclaimed and popular works of short fiction.S...
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Death in the Afternoon
Ernest HemingwayErnest Hemingway's classic exploration of the history and pageantry of bullfighting, and the deeper themes of cowardice, bravery, sport and tragedy that it inspires.Still considere...
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The Paris Hours
Alex George“Like All the Light We Cannot See, The Paris Hours explores the brutality of war and its lingering effects with cinematic intensity. The ending will leave you breathless.” Christin...
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The Paris Wife
Paula McLainNEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER A deeply evocative novel of ambition and betrayal that captures the love affair between two unforgettable people, Ernest Hemingway and his wife Hadl...