Paris, France

First published the day in 1940 Paris fell to the Germans, Paris France is one of Gertrude Stein's greatest literary achievements. It is a lucid, perceptive, witty, gentle account of her lifelong love affair with France, her home for 40 years. Written in the same narrative style that made The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas a best seller in 1933, this book unites Stein's childhood memoirs of Paris with trenchant observations and fascinating anecdotes about everything from French cooking to the life of French animals to the human nature of French men and women. Stein discusses the art of painting and delves into her experiences with artists and musicians to provide numerous amusing anecdotes about her countless friends, famous and unknown. Gertrude Stein (1874 - 1946) was an American novelist, poet, playwright, and art collector. Born in Pittsburgh, Penna., and raised in Oakland, Calif., Stein moved to Paris in 1903, and made France her home for the remainder of her life. She hosted a salon where the leading figures of modernism in the arts such as Pablo Picasso, Ernest Hemingway, Ezra Pound, Virgil Thomson, and Henri Matisse would meet. Two quotes have become widely known: "Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose" and "there is no there there", with the latter often taken to be a reference to her childhood home. Other books include Three Lives (1905-06) and The Making of Americans (1902-1911). Stein's writings were a subject of amusement for her brother Leo, who characterized her work as an "abomination". Later detractors deemed her experimentation as the serendipitous result of her alleged inability to communicate through linguistic convention, deficient in the skills required "to deal effectively with language, so that she made her greatest weakness into her most remarkable strength". Several of Stein's writings have been set to music by composers, including Thomson's operas Four Saints in Three Acts and The Mother of Us All.