Amajor American writer associated with literary Modernism and Cubist painting, Stein is noted for her avant-garde approach to language and literature. Rejecting patriarchal literary traditions, Stein produced novels, plays, and poetry known for their obscurity and characterized by multiplicity of meanings and absence of punctuation. Her most famous, and most successful, work is her 1933 autobiography The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, named for her lifelong companion.

Biographical Information

The youngest of five children, Stein was born in Allegheny, Pennsylvania, on February 3, 1874, into a wealthy Jewish family. Her parents, Daniel Stein and Amelia Keyser Stein, moved the family to Europe a year after Stein's birth; they spent three years in Vienna and two in Paris before returning to America where they took up residence in Oakland, California. The education of the Stein children—particularly the two youngest, Gertrude and her brother Leo—during this period was chaotic, consisting of...