Gertrude Stein (1874-1946) is one of the original American Modernists. Born in Pennsylvania, she lived most of her life in Paris with her partner, Alice B. Toklas. Formally groundbreaking works like  Three Lives (1909),  Tender Buttons (1914) and  The Making of Americans (1925) established her reputation as an avant-garde stylist, and  The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas made her an international celebrity. As an experimental writer she has been an inspiration to countless novelists and poets, from Ernest Hemingway and Edith Sitwell to Jack Kerouac and Robert Duncan.