Favored Strangers: Gertrude Stein and Her Family

by Linda Wagner-Martin

One version of Gertrude Stein’s life (1874-1946)––the story of the idiosyncratic art collector and writer, ruling the expatriates in Paris with her immense personal power––has been told so often that it has become a piece of Americana, burnished to a high gloss through repetition. Inspired by extensive original research, Linda Wagner-Martin breaks with that tradition in this major new biography.  Here we find Gertrude Stein as we have never seen her as a member of her German-Jewish patriarchal family, as an undergraduate at Radcliffe, as an odd sort of feminist, as a medical student at Johns Hopkins University, as a lesbian and a lover, as an art collector, as a war survivor, and much more­­––as a person and not just a modernist icon. Throughout, her relationship with her two older brothers––Michael and Leo––shaped her emotional existence, just as her commitment to writing shaped her intellectual life.              This fascinating portrait of Gertrude Stein’s life offers a rich history of “The Stein Corporation.” Wagner-Martin provides new insight into the influence of Alice B.Toklas, a look into the economic side of the family’s existence, and the intimate story of the Steins’ relationships with Matisse, Picasso, Gris, and other painters; and later, of Gertrude Stein’s relationships with Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Virgil Thomson, Thornton Wilder, Janet Flanner, Mabel Dodge Luhan, and many other colorful modernist writers and artists in the rue de Fleurus salon. This biography also gives us a previously untold but chilling account of Gertrude Stein's and Alice Toklas’s survival during World War II in France, and Leo Stein’s in Italy.              “Favored  Strangers” is a story of survival––creative, psychological, racial, sexual––that opens our eyes to what being a female and an outsider at the turn of the century, and through much of its turbulent early years, truly meant.  If you thought you knew the story of Gertrude Stein, this book proves you wrong.

Genres: Biography, Nonfiction, History

368 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 1995

About the author

Linda Wagner-Martin is the Frank Borden Hanes Professor of English and Comparative Literature Emerita at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. Over a teaching career spanning 53 years, she taught at Wayne State University, Michigan State University, and UNC, while authoring and editing more than 55 books. Her work includes biographies of major literary figures such as Sylvia Plath, Ernest Hemingway, Toni Morrison, and Maya Angelou, along with studies like A History of American Literature from 1950 to the Present and The Routledge Introduction to American Postmodernism. After retiring in 2011, she continued publishing extensively. Wagner-Martin’s contributions have earned her prestigious awards, including the Guggenheim Fellowship, the Hubbell Medal for Lifetime Service to American Literature, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Radcliffe Institute. She holds BA, BS, MA, and PhD degrees from Bowling Green State University, where she graduated magna cum laude with majors in English and minors in American History.

Reviews

[Corinne Blackmer · Rating 4 out of 5]

A classic and highly intelligent look at Stein's relationships with her family, featuring her difficult bond with her jealous and not-too-successful brother Leo, who suffered terribly from jealousy.

[Carrie Cantalupo-Sharp · Rating 5 out of 5]

Most fascinating! A renewed appreciation of Gertrude Stein and her significance in the world of the arts.

[Mrs Olga A Danes-Volkov · Rating 5 out of 5]

Not an easy read

This monumental work was intended for brighter intellects than mine but it is nevertheless interesting. Gertrude Stein obviously was immensely charismatic but boy, was she pleased with herself. Such writing that is quoted in this book to me, at least, is unmitigated gobbledegook. However, despite polarising people from beginning to end, she undoubtedly charmed and influenced a great many . Her poor wife, Alice Toklas seems to have had a pretty tough time of it and to have been ill served by Stein at the end of her life. No, I could not like anything about Gertrude Stein but I'm glad I read this book

[Linda Stansbury · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lots of info

A bit clinical in places but very thoroughly detailed, referencing conversations, academic records, personal letters and stories. As I expected, everything matched, often verbatim, to what I'd read in other books about Stein's life, although there were a lot of details included here that I'd not read elsewhere. A good, long read.