Gertrude Stein

Gertrude Stein (1874–1946) was an American writer who lived in Paris from 1903 and whose salon at 27 rue de Fleurus, kept with her companion Alice B. Toklas, brought together Picasso, Matisse, Hemingway and Fitzgerald. She had studied psychology with William James at Radcliffe and medicine at Johns Hopkins before turning to writing. Three Lives, The Making of Americans and Tender Buttons experimented with repetition, the present tense and the sound of words; The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, written in her companion's voice, made her famous in 1933. She also wrote the libretto for Virgil Thomson's opera Four Saints in Three Acts and coined the phrase the lost generation.