Three Lives - Stein, Gertrude

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Résumé :
Gertrude Stein's first published work Three Lives is divided into three different stories, each one a psychological portrait of a different woman. The Good Anna describes an exacting German house servant; Melanctha explores the love affair of an African-American woman, and The Gentle Lena narrates the fate of a patient German maid. The three narratives are independent of each other, but all are set in the fictional town of Bridgepoint. The innovative style of Three Lives broke with narrative, linear, and temporal conventions and catapulted Stein to the forefront of the American Modernist movement and inspired such later novelists as Ernest Hemingway and Jack Kerouac.

Biographie:
Gertrude Stein (1874 - 1946) was an American novelist, poet, playwright and art collector. Born in the Allegheny West neighborhood of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and raised in Oakland, California, Stein moved to Paris in 1903 and made France her home for the remainder of her life. She hosted a Paris salon, where the leading figures of modernism in literature and art, such as Pablo Picasso, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sinclair Lewis, Ezra Pound, Sherwood Anderson and Henri Matisse, would meet. In 1933, Stein published a quasi-memoir of her Paris years, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, written in the voice of Alice B. Toklas, her life partner and an American-born member of the Parisian avant-garde. The book became a literary bestseller and vaulted Stein from the relative obscurity of the cult-literature scene into the limelight of mainstream attention. Two quotes from her works 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 of Oakland, California. Her books include Q.E.D. (Quod Erat Demonstrandum) (1903), about a lesbian romantic affair involving several of Stein's female friends, Fernhurst, a fictional story about a romantic affair, Three Lives (1905-06) and The Making of Americans (1902-1911). In Tender Buttons (1914), Stein commented on lesbian sexuality. Her activities during World War II have been the subject of analysis and commentary. As a Jew living in Nazi-occupied France, Stein may have only been able to sustain her lifestyle as an art collector and indeed to ensure her physical safety, through the protection of the powerful Vichy government official and Nazi collaborator Bernard Fa?. After the war ended, Stein expressed admiration for another Nazi collaborator, Vichy leader Marshal P?tain.