On February 3, 1874, Gertrude Stein was born into a German-Jewish family in Allegheny,
PA. She was raised in Oakland, CA in a family of five children. Their mother died
when Gertrude was 14.
She and her brother Leo were extremely close to one
another. They attended public school in Oakland, then went to Harvard.
At Radcliffe, Gertrude was fascinated with psychology and took classes with Professor William James, the famous psychologist.
Gertrude tells this story in the Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas:
William James delighted her. ... It was a very lovely spring day, Gertrude
Stein had been going to the opera every night and also going to the opera
in the afternoons and had been otherwise engrossed and it was the period of
the final examinations, and there was an examination in William James'
course. She sat down with the examination before her and she just could
not.
She wrote at the top of her paper,
Dear Professor James, I am so
sorry but really I do not feel a bit like an examination in philosophy
to-day.
and left.
The next day she had a postal card from William James
saying,
Dear Miss Stein, I understand perfectly how you feel. I often feel
like that myself.
And underneath he gave her work the highest mark in his
course.
After Radcliffe, Gertrude Stein went to medical school at Johns Hopkins, though she left one class short of getting her degree. Soon afterward,
she moved to Paris.
