Gertrude Stein was a titan of early feminism and one of the great pioneers of the modernist world. Born in Pennsylvania in 1874, Stein lived through a period of global upheaval, writing groundbreaking literature and supporting emerging poets and artists. Luminaries like Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Ezra Pound, Jean Cocteau, Ernest Hemingway, and F. Scott Fitzgerald were regular visitors at her famous Paris salon, where she lived with her life partner of forty years, Alice B. Toklas.

Her complex personal beliefs and politics still defy easy categorisation, inspiring controversy to this day. Stein was a one-woman renegade literary movement, and her body of work - including Three Lives, Tender Buttons, The Making of Americans, and The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas - broke a long succession of moulds. When she died in 1946, Gertrude Stein was a transcontinental literary icon, and one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century.