Matisse Picasso and Gertrude Stein with Two Shorter Stories
1933
Publication Order of Children’s Books
The World Is Round
1939
Publication Order of Poetry Collections
Tender Buttons
1914
Before the Flowers of Friendship Faded Friendship Faded
1931
Publication Order of Plays
Geography and Plays
1922
Operas and Plays
1932
Four Saints in Three Acts
1934
Last Operas and Plays
1949
Publication Order of Yale Edition of the Unpublished Writings Books
Two: Gertrude Stein and Her Brother, and Other Early Portraits
1951
Mrs. Reynolds and Five Earlier Novelettes
1952
Bee Time Vine and Other Pieces
1953
As Fine as Melanctha
1954
Painted Lace and Other Pieces
1955
Stanzas in Meditation and Other Poems
1956
Alphabets and Birthdays
1957
A Novel of Thank You
1958
Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books
Composition as Explanation
1926
Useful Knowledge
1928
An Acquaintance with Description
1929
How to Write
1931
The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas
1933
Portraits and Prayers
1934
Lectures in America
1935
Narration
1935
The Geographical History of America
1936
Everybody’s Autobiography
1937
Picasso
1938
Paris France
1940
What Are Masterpieces
1940
Wars I Have Seen
1945
Four in America
1947
About Gertrude Stein
Gertrude Stein (born 1874, died 1946) was an American novelist, poet, playwright and art collector who lived in Paris from 1903 and hosted a salon there for the leading figures of modernist art and writing. Her books include “Three Lives”, “Tender Buttons”, “The Making of Americans” and “The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas”.
Stein was born on 3 February 1874 in Allegheny, Pennsylvania, the last of seven children, and was raised in Oakland, California. She studied at Radcliffe College from 1893 to 1897, where she was a student of the psychologist William James, and then enrolled at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, which she left without a degree. In 1902 she followed her brother Leo to London, and the following year the two moved to Paris.
Her home at 27 rue de Fleurus became a meeting place for Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, among others. “Three Lives” (1909), her first critically acclaimed publication, consists of three independent stories set in Bridgepoint, a fictional town based on Baltimore. “Tender Buttons” (1914) is a short book in three sections called “Objects”, “Food” and “Rooms”. The long novel “The Making of Americans”, which follows the Hersland and Dehning families, was written between 1902 and 1911 and first published in Paris in 1925 in an edition of 500 copies.
“The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas” (1933), a memoir of her Paris years written in the voice of her life partner, became a bestseller and made Stein a celebrity in the United States. In October 1934 she returned to America after an absence of thirty years for a six-month lecture tour, and Random House agreed to publish her future work. “Four Saints in Three Acts”, her opera libretto set to music by Virgil Thomson, was published in 1934. Later books include “Everybody’s Autobiography” (1937), “Paris France” (1940), the novel “Ida” (1941) and “Wars I Have Seen” (1945).
Stein died on 27 July 1946 at the American Hospital in Neuilly-sur-Seine, after surgery for stomach cancer, and was buried in Père Lachaise Cemetery. She had named Carl Van Vechten as her literary executor, and he helped to bring out the work she left unpublished, including the Yale University Press volumes that ended with “A Novel of Thank You” in 1958. Her first novel, “Q.E.D.”, completed in 1903, did not appear until 1950, under the title “Things As They Are”.
