Gertrude Stein and the Lost Generation

Gertrude Stein and the Lost Generation: A striking portrait of the woman behind the legends. Paris, the 1920s. At 27 Rue de Fleurus, writers, painters and intellectuals gather around an extraordinary woman who seems to know everyone who matters. Hemingway, Picasso, Matisse, Fitzgerald, Sherwood Anderson and Braque all pass through her salon. Yet while the artists and writers around her would become cultural icons, Gertrude Stein herself was too often overshadowed by the legends she helped create. This graphic biography brings her back to the centre of the story. Born in Pennsylvania in 1874 into a wealthy Jewish family of German origin, Stein moved to Europe at the beginning of the twentieth century and settled in Paris, where she lived with her brother Leo and, later, with Alice B. Toklas, her lifelong partner. Together, Stein and Toklas created one of the most celebrated salons of the modernist era, a meeting place where literature, painting, ideas and radical new ways of seeing the world collided. Valentina Grande and Eva Rossetti draw a vivid portrait of a woman who stood at the crossroads of modern literature, avant-garde art, American expatriate culture and changing ideas about gender and freedom. Rather than reducing Stein to the glamorous circle she inspired, Grande and Rossetti ask a sharper question: why did so many of the people around her become legends, while Stein herself was so often pushed to the margins of the story? Translated from the Italian by Monica Meneghetti