Lunch with the Libraries: Happy Birthday, Gertrude Stein!

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Happy Birthday Gertrude Stein!

Gertrude Stein was born on February 3, 1874—almost 150 years ago! After growing up in Vienna, Paris, and Oakland, California, she attended the "Radcliffe Annex" for women at Harvard University, and then the Johns Hopkins Medical School in one of the first classes that accepted female students. Although she did not finish her medical degree, she put her psychological training to use in experimental writing that makes unusual insights into character and challenges readers' cognitive habits. Her best-known book is The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, which made her famous, but the one she cared about the most is The Making of Americans.

We will celebrate this major birthday milestone with a peek into the Robert A. Wilson Collection of Gertrude Stein Materials at the Sheridan Libraries, a large collection of rare books, manuscripts, photographs, and ephemera by and about Gertrude Stein, through the eyes of three undergraduate students who worked intensively with the collection last semester. Their "mini-exhibits" help us understand Gertrude Stein's literary ambitions and the ways her work has been re-interpreted over time.