Gertrude Stein

Gertrude Stein, the American modernist writer, was an international celebrity, an artistic iconoclast, and a self-proclaimed genius. Herliterary experiments still puzzle structuralist, deconstructionist, and feminist critics. Her contribution to American literature, however, is not in doubt: Scholars consider Stein an important innovator whose attention to language and questioning of narrative conventions influencedsuch writers as Ernest Hemingway and Sherwood Anderson. A legendary personality, from the early 1900s, when she first arrived in Paris, until her death in 1946, she reigned at the center of a flourishing Parisian salon whose guests included Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse, Edith Sitwell and Harold Acton, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Thornton Wilder, and scores of other writers, artists, and musicians.