Gertrude Stein
Occupation
Gertrude Stein was an American born author and poet best known for her modernist writings, fictional novels, and short prose poems. She was also an extensive Post Impressionist art collector. Her writings and poems tried express artistic movements like Cubism except through a literary means. She wanted to show what artistic expressionists like Pablo Picasso show through their art in her literary work.
Major accomplishments
The Autobiography of Alice B. Tolkas(1933) and The Making of Americans(1925) were her most famous novels that really made her a recognizable figure. She also wrote a collection of short prose poems and arranged the sentences and pictures to reflect cubist paintings to show her love for the modernist art movement and support upcoming artists like Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse. She also wrote plays like "Four Saints in Three Acts" and "Mother of Us All" but Virgil Thompson turned both her plays into operas.
Life in Paris
Gertrude Stein moved to Paris in 1903 because of the conflicting views she had on art and ideologies in America. She stayed with her brother, Leo Stein, for a while before moving with her partner Alice B. Tolkas. For most of the 1920's she focused mainly on her writings and art collecting. Her brother and she collected Post Impressionist paintings, thus helping and supporting upcoming artists launch their careers like Henri Matisse, Juan Gris, and Pablo Picasso. She at one point worked with Ernest Hemingway and mentored him in modernist literature. Stein also hosted literary salons where writers and artists would come and express ideas. Stein called the artists of that generation the "Lost Generation". F. Scott Fitzgerald was one of these writers who came to the salon. He and Stein would both critique each other's literary works and provide more insight on the matter. Stein left Paris with an innovative new perspective on art not just visually but through literary means. Paris was full of extensive ideas and concepts that strongly influenced her work. If she hadn't moved to Paris then she would never have been exposed to these abstract ideas and probably wouldn't be the woman she is today