• Illuminating Illustrations: Francis Rose and Gertrude Stein

    In 1946, the artist Francis Rose completed a series of drawings to be included in The Gertrude Stein First Reader & Three Plays, by Gertrude Stein, which was first published in 1946. Three of these sketches are preserved in the Robert A. Wilson collection of Gertrude Stein materials at Johns Hopkins University. Two of these Read more

  • Q.E.D. – Questions Ever Deferred

    Q.E.D. – Questions Ever Deferred

    During Gertrude Stein’s career, she had early difficulties getting published, leaving several of her works to be published posthumously. One of the earliest pieces she wrote after leaving medical school faced this fate, a text she titled “Q.E.D.,” which she seems to have placed in a drawer after completion and then forgotten. As described in The Read more

  • The Invisible Collaboration Behind the Plain Edition

    My sister recently published a novel and has spent the last two years learning the skills required for self-publication: editing, formatting, marketing, and more. After witnessing my sister’s escapades, I was interested in exploring Gertrude Stein’s own experiences with publishing her works. Between the years 1931 and 1933, Stein published five books with her partner Read more

  • Concurrent Geniuses: Gertrude Stein, Pablo Picasso, and the Interests of Friendship

    Gertrude Stein was many things: a novelist, poet, playwright, ambulance driver, publisher, and art collector. Most know her today as an eccentric lesbian who wrote eccentric books and kept eccentric company. Most do not know how deeply intertwined these aspects of her life were. Her friends, her writing, her art collecting, and her business were Read more

  • How Gertrude Stein and Other Female Artists Were Able to Find a Publishing Platform After WWI

    While exploring Gertrude Stein’s published works in the Robert A. Wilson collection, I found that Stein was featured in four issues of Broom: An International Magazine Of The Arts. Three of these issues contain parts of Stein’s “If You Had Three Husbands”, published throughout January, April, and June of 1922. In addition, Broom published Stein’s Read more

  • Friends Writing Across an Ocean

    Friends Writing Across an Ocean

    Throughout her life, Gertrude Stein had several close friends who doubled as colleagues within the modernist art and literary movement. Mabel Dodge Luhan, a fellow American writer and a famous author in her own right, became a friend of Stein’s during a brief visit to 27 rue de Fleurus in the spring of 1911. Their Read more