To understand Gertrude Stein’s place in American Literature—and modernist literature as a whole—is to take a journey through a fascinating history. The author of Three Lives (1909), Tender Buttons (1914), The Making of Americans (1925), The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933), and many others works, collected and uncollected, Stein frequently defied easy classification.
It all starts with Stein’s birth in Allegheny, Pennsylvania on Feb. 3, 1874. As an adult, she eventually trained in medicine, studying at Johns Hopkins University (she earned an undergraduate degree in psychology from Radcliffe College in 1898 under famed psychologist William James, the brother of Henry), but left without completing her degree. Puzzles fascinated her, and in a way, her journey from America to Paris (with her brother Leo) provided enough enigmas to explore, as she deepened “her theories of art and the literary experiments she was undertaking,” as Shari Benstock writes in Women of the Left Bank. Perhaps moving from medical mysteries to more provocative ones, such as the mystery of trying to convey what a Picasso painting does to the viewer in a particular set of words, helped to reinvent—and recontextualize—what art could do under modernist pressure.
“In the years when she worked at night in the rue de Fleurus [she moved to Paris in 1903], isolated from the larger literary community growing up around her,” Benstock explains, “she was learning something about her methods from the visual arts, by watching the practice of the Cubists, who divorced painting from representation and broke the visual subject into its component lines and dimensions. Stein knew that her experiments with language were similar to Picasso’s efforts in painting.” It borders on cliché to remark, without irony, that Stein was an original, but in her life and in her art, she embodied this like no other: geography—the Left Bank in particular—played an essential role in this development.
France, arguably, is the true starting place of Stein’s famous legacy. It might, at this juncture, seem highly reductive to invoke the Marvel Universe in providing an analogous example to show how Stein “brushed up” against many of the key figures of the modernist period, from the 1920s to the postwar 1940s. However, like Stan Lee’s Marvel Comics characters coming into contact with one another, where the Silver Surfer might meet Spider-Man, or Captain America might have a conversation with Charles Xavier of the X-Men; so too, did Stein influence, serve as patron, mentor, and interlocutor, to a veritable “who’s who” of modernist literature and art.