Understanding A Raisin in the Sun: A Student Casebook to Issues, Sources, and Historical Documents Book

Gertrude Stein is famous for being, among other things, a collector of modern art, a guiding light of Modernism and the most important experimental writer of the Twentieth Century. But most of all she is noted for being the Grande Dame of the Paris salon scene in the first four decades of the century and the heart of "The Lost Generation." (Ernest Hemingway credits the phrase to Stein, who was then his mentor and patron.) Gertrude Stein by Lucy Daniel is an interesting and well-researched biography.
Gertrude was born in Philadelphia in 1874. Her early childhood was spent in Vienna and Paris. Eventually the family settled in Oakland, California. At age 14, after her mother died, she went to Baltimore to live with her mother's family. Her formal education began at Radcliffe, which then functioned as a female coordinate institution for the all-male Harvard College. She studied psychology and had a particular interest in the psychology and definition of character. She next enrolled in Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. It was during this period that she began to write. Her excitement about writing caused her interest in medicine to wane and she dropped out with only a few courses to go.
In 1903 she moved to Paris with her brother Leo. She stayed for more than thirty years. It was here at 427 Rue de Fleures that their art collection was displayed and here that the Saturday night salon gatherings began. The list of attendees is long but some of the most famous were Pablo Picasso, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sinclair Lewis, Ezra Pound, Henri Matisse, Thornton Wilder and Sherwood Anderson. It was here that conversation was elevated to an art form. It was also here that snobbery and favoritism could be part reputation-making and reputation-breaking. During the third decade of the century there was a waning of the importance of the salon if not its notoriety. The golden age was gone and Stein's salon was becoming a kind of tourist attraction continuing to attract lots of people, mostly American, but with diminishing influence.
Stein's earliest writing of note was The Making of Americans Being the History of a Family's Progress (1902-1911). She called it "the long book. It is a compendium of items from her notebooks, more than half a million words long, full of her experimentation including her ideas about the psychology of character and abstract portraits. Her "painting with words" was called unreadable by some critics. It led to a proliferation of parodies some of which were read by more people than the original writing. Her literary style is remarkable in that it is almost impossible to categorize. She is definitely Modernist but has also been labeled as Futurist, Dadaist, Fauvist, Orphist, Vorticist and Imagist.
The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas is Stein's most familiar work. Most people found that it could be read and it had a tremendous impact though Stein, and, indeed, Toklas, felt it was greatly misunderstood and misinterpreted.
She returned to America in 1934-35 to a storm of celebrity and publicity. Gertrude and Alice lived out World War II in Neuilly-sur-Seine after fleeing Paris from the Nazis. Her right-leaning politics caused some to accuse her of Vichy collaboration.
After the war Gertrude and Alice returned to Paris. Gertrude continued to write until her death in 1946. Alice B. Toklas followed her in death 20 years later. In her lifetime she created novels, biographies, poems, essays and plays along with a vast collection of notes. In her struggle for ethnic, sexual, racial, and cultural identity perhaps her greatest creation was her own persona. Her legacy and influence are undoubtable.
Read a book. Pick out a biography. Share the magic and adventure of an exceptional life.