about the quoted person:American avant-garde writer.

Stein spent her infancy in Vienna and Paris and her girlhood in Oakland, Calif. At Radcliffe College she studied psychology with the philosopher William James, and apparently had somewhat of a close friendship with the philosopher. After further study at Johns Hopkins medical school she went to Paris, where she was able to live by private means.

Stein was among the first collectors of works by the Cubists and other experimental painters of the period, such as Pablo Picasso (who painted her portrait), Henri Matisse, and Georges Braque, several of whom became her friends. At her salon they mingled with expatriate American writers, such as Sherwood Anderson and Ernest Hemingway.

In her own work, stein attempted to parallel the theories of Cubism, specifically in her concentration on the illumination of the present moment and her use of slightly varied repetitions and extreme simplification and fragmentation. Among her work that was most thoroughly influenced by Cubism is 'tender Buttons' (1914), which carries fragmentation and abstraction beyond the borders of intelligibility.

Her first published book, 'Three Lives' (1909), the stories of three working-class women, has been called a minor masterpiece. 'The Making of Americans', a long composition written in 1906-08 but not published until 1925, was too convoluted and obscure for general readers. Her only book to reach a wide public was 'The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas' (1933), actually Stein's own autobiography. The performance in the United States of her 'Four Saints in Three Acts' (1934), which the composer Virgil Thomson had made into an opera, led to a triumphal American lecture tour in 1934-35. Thomson also wrote the music for her second opera, 'The Mother of Us All' (published 1947), based on the life of feminist Susan B. Anthony.

Stein became a legend in Paris, especially after surviving the German occupation of France and befriending the many young American servicemen who visited her. She wrote about these soldiers in 'Brewsie and Willie' (1946).

She remained in France until her death on July 29, 1946, at 72 years of age. The majority of her work was unpublished at her death, or published only with very small press runs. Her legacy remains debated in terms of status in the canon, but it is agreed that she is a major figure of the Modernist period.