Gertrude Stein

In the 1920's, Paris was a center of creativity, a place where new ideas in art and literature flourished. Man of the most talented writers and painters gathered frequently at the home of Gertrude Stein, a witty, opinionated American writer and art collector.
Stein was born in Pennsylvania and grew up on the West Coast. She graduated from Radcliffe College and then studied medicine. But she left medical school before earning a degree and went to Europe in 1902. Indepdenently wealthy, she lived abroad the rest of her life, mostly in Paris.
Stein collected paintings by such artists as Pablo Picasso and Henry Matisse, little known then but considered masters today. Their paintings were not realistic; instead they often took apart familiar images and reassembled the pieces in startling arrangements. Stein tried to do with words what those artists did with paint. Her poetry and other writings are filled with repetition and often seem to make little sense. But her reputation as an artist and an important influence on your writers, including Ernest Hemingway, grew steadily. Her best-known book is The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklars, published in 1933. It told more about Stein's life than about Toklas, who was her lifelong companion.
Gertrude Stein coined the phrase "the Lost Generation" to describe the groups of Americans living in Paris in the 1920s.

Oh Those Flappers!

Young and rebellious, they wanted to live a very different life from that of their mothers. They were known as “flappers,” and with their boyfriends---their “sheikhs”----they were the “flaming youth” of the period known as the Roaring Twenties.


Instead of ankle-length skirts, heavy black stockings, and long hair piled on top of their heads, the flappers wore short skirts, rolled-down silk stockings, and bobbed hair. They used lipstick and rouge and learned the latest dances of the “jazz age,” such as the Charleston and the Black Bottom. And they adopted many customs previously reserved for men, including smoking, drinking, and driving. “She will never knit you a necktie,” wrote one journalist about the flapper, “but she’ll drive you from the station in her little sports car.”


Of course, not all young American women were flappers. Many were too conservative or too timid for such open persuit of pleasure. But the flappers symbolized the restlessness of a changing America that was reexamining its social structure and its values. When the stock market crashed in 1929, bringing about the Great Depression, the era of the flapper ended as suddenly as American prosperity.


The word “flapper” originally meant a bird that was too young to fly. By the late 1800s, it was used to describe any young girl. By 1920, it came to mean a free-spirited young woman.