Gertrude Stein: Biography

This is a lovely site, with lots of nice photos and quotes.

Here is a lamentably stale encyclopedia entry I wrote for The Columbia Encyclopedia of Modern Drama:

Life. GERTRUDE STEIN (1874-1946) was born in Allegheny, Pennsylvania but lived in Europe until her wealthy German-Jewish family relocated to Oakland when she was five. She led a privileged and independent childhood, reading prodigiously and frequently attending opera and theater. She attended Radcliffe (then Harvard Annex), studied psychology with William James and attended medical school at Johns Hopkins before expatriating to Paris with her brother Leo. There, she became a prescient collector of modern painting (Cezanne, Matisse, Picasso), the hostess of an enormously influential salon, the life-partner of Alice B. Toklas, an icon of the avant-garde, and the author of more than six hundred literary works. She achieved commercial success at 59 and was lionized by the media and public during her lecture tour of America in 1934. Although her celebrity outshone her artistic achievements in the popular imagination, Stein’s subversive, experimental writing project has influenced the generations after her and scholars and theater practitioners have become increasingly interested in her work.

Work. Although her best-known work, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, is a straightforward if whimsical narrative, her importance as a writer comes from the thoroughness and breadth of her experiments in a wide range of genres. Important texts include her massive novel The Making of Americans, a cubist-inspired series of portraits called Tender Buttons, as well as a number of texts that bring together her singular poetic voice with her interests in philosophy, psychology, language and the rhythms of consciousness. Her style affects a naivete that is analogous to fauvism in art, a complexity and multi-dimensionality that gives her affinities with the cubists, and a penchant for strategies of non-meaning that link her with Dada. Her mixture of lush poetry and cryptically encoded eroticism anticipates both progressive queer writing and language poetry.

Plays. Stein’s eighty plays, many of which remain unproduced, constitute modernism’s most thoroughgoing departure from dramaturgical conventions, completely re-imagining our expectations of story, incident, and time and dismissing entirely conventional notions of character and dialogue. With few exceptions, her plays take place in a “continuous present” in which they are perpetually in a state of beginning and their revision is a frequent subject of the plays themselves. In later plays, like Four Saints in Three Acts, she expanded her aesthetic to include the notion of the play as landscape. While the theoretical dimension of her playwriting is heady and abstract, the texts themselves pay earthy, sensuous homage to the everyday, often incorporating into their unfoldings texts from letters, advertisements, and lists and characters from history, from her life, and from the newspapers. Her lecture/essay “Plays” is one of the most searching and vigorous theoretical documents of the modern theater.

Influence. Stein has had a crucial influence on the development of American avant-garde theater; her plays have been produced by The Living Theater, Judson Church, The Wooster Group, Anne Bogart, James Lapine, Richard Foreman, and Robert Wilson. Her influence is also keenly felt in the writing of her contemporary Thornton Wilder as well as Lee Breuer, Suzan-Lori Parks, and David Greenspan, and her notion of the play as landscape paved the way for environmental theater, site-specific theater, and performance art.

Plays.
Gertrude Stein’s plays are collected in these volumes: Geography and Plays, Operas and Plays, Last Operas and Plays. Also recommended is A Stein Reader edited by Ulla Dydo.

Bibliography.
Ulla Dydo, Gertrude Stein: The Language That Rises : 1923-1934
Bonnie Marranca, Ecologies of Theater
Marc Robinson, The Other American Drama
Betsy Alayne Ryan, Gertrude Stein’s Theater of the Absolute
Renate Stendhal (ed.), Gertrude Stein in Words and Pictures