Gertrude Stein was born in Allegheny, Pennsylvania, in 1874. As a child she lived in Vienna and Paris before returning to the United States to study at Radcliffe College and Johns Hopkins Medical School but left before taking her degree. In 1903 Stein moved to France where she lived with Alice B. Toklas.Her first novel, Three Lives, was published in 1909. Its prose style is highly unconventional and virtually dispenses with standard punctuation. Tender Buttons (1914) was even more experimental and sold extremely poorly. Other work by Stein include her theory of writing, Composition and Explanation (1926), The Autobiography of Alice B.

Toklas (1933), two volumes of memoirs, Everybody's Autobiography (1937) and Wars I Have Seen (1945). Stein died at Neuilly-sur-Seine in 1946.