This image is the cover for the book Three Lives

Three Lives

The celebrated author of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas explores the lives of three working-class women in this collection of stories.

In Three Lives, Gertrude Stein creates portraits of three women in a fictional mid-Atlantic town. There’s Anna, who flees hardship in Germany to become a housekeeper in America. Then there is Melanctha, a street-smart black girl on a quest for knowledge and power. And finally, there is Lena, a German immigrant whose life is shaped around her passive nature.

Published in 1909, Three Lives was Gertrude Stein’s first critically acclaimed work. It was influenced by the paintings of Cézanne, Picasso, and Matisse. In these pages, Stein experiments with language and literary form to tell the stories of three unforgettable women.

Gertrude Stein

Gertrude Stein (1874–1946) was an American novelist and poet. Born in Pennsylvania, in 1903 she immigrated to France, where she would live for the rest of her life. The home on the Left Bank of Paris that she shared with her partner, Alice B. Toklas, became a cultural hub as young artists and writers began to gather there. As her salon rose to prominence, Stein befriended several expatriate authors living in Paris, including Djuna Barnes, James Joyce, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Ernest Hemingway. Stein has been credited with coining the term the lost generation to describe this group of writers. She died in France in 1946. 

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