Title: Portrait of Gertrude Stein, with dog Pepe, Biliguin
Digital ID: 5a52652
URL: http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/van.5a52652
Description:
“Gertrude Stein (b. Feb. 3, 1874 , Allegheny, Pa. , U.S. --d. July 27, 1946, Paris), avant-garde American writer, eccentric, and self-styled genius, whose Paris home was a salon for the leading artists and writers of the period between World Wars I and II.
Her first published book, Three Lives (1909), the stories of three working-class women, has been called a minor masterpiece. The Making of Americans, a long composition written in 1906-08 but not published until 1925, was too convoluted and obscure for general readers, for whom she remained essentially the author of such lines as "A rose is a rose is a rose is a rose." Her only book to reach a wide public was The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933), actually Stein's own autobiography. The performance in the United States of her Four Saints in Three Acts (1934), which the composer Virgil Thomson had made into an opera, led to a triumphal American lecture tour in 1934-35. Thomson also wrote the music for her second opera, The Mother of Us All (published 1947), based on the life of feminist Susan B. Anthony.
Stein became a legend in Paris, especially after surviving the German occupation of France and befriending the many young American servicemen who visited her. She wrote about these soldiers in Brewsie and Willie (1946).”