Sister Brother: Gertrude and Leo Stein

By Brenda Wineapple

Book Overview

Devoted, eccentric, and compelling, Gertrude and Leo Stein were constant companions, from childhood to adulthood, until, finally, they spoke no more. Americans, expatriates, and virtually orphans, they lived together for almost forty years, collaborating in one of the great artistic and literary adventures of the twentieth century. Sister Brother tells the story of that adventure and relationship. With a personality that drew people toward her--regardless of what they thought of her inventive, hermetic prose--Gertrude Stein dazzled and perplexed. Enigmatic, intelligent, and self-absorbed, Leo also dazzled but in his own way. One of the crucial figures in Gertrude's early years, he was the original guiding spirit of the famed salon at 27 rue de Fleurus, which continued for almost two decades. From her early days as a medical student to her first days in Paris, Gertrude was passionately driven toward the career in which she distinguished herself, demanding appreciation as an exceptional writer who knew precisely what she intended. This book shows how Gertrude slowly struggled with what became a unique voice--and why her brother spurned it. With its wealth of new and rare material, its reconstruction of Leo's famed art collection, and its array of characters--from Bernard Berenson to Pablo Picasso--this biography offers the first glimpse into the smoldering sibling relationship that helped form two of the twentieth century's most unusual figures.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0803217536
• ISBN13: 9780803217539
• Release Date: March 2008
• Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
• Length: 536 Pages
• Weight: 1.63 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

The Ego that was GERTRUDE

This book doesn't present any great revelations and certainly won't surprise those already familiar with the egomaniacal Ms. Stein but for anyone who has suffered the pains of sibling rifts this is any interesting read. Both brother and sister are tortured and pathetic in their own ways, Gertrude for having stubbornly believed she was a literary genius (a delusion I doubt fostered by very many today with the value of her literary contributions negligible) and Leo for having simply been a neurotic posterchild who couldn't go on with his life after their separation. This is a better book still because it does not focus on Gertrude's non-existent literary legacy but instead chooses to reveal two lives both richly interesting and complex and yet with a bitter vulnerability.

A wonderfully interesting and provocative biography

Brenda Wineapple's SISTER BROTHER tells the story of thedevelopment of a remarkably close and rich relationship betweenGertrude and Leo Stein. Gertrude -- writer, esthetic innovator, feminist precursor-- and her brother Leo -- art collector extraordinaire, scholar manque--were a remarkable pair. From their childhood in a family bereft of its mother, through years in the heady intellectual atmosphere of turn-of-the-century Harvard and Johns Hopkins, Leo and Gertrude depended on one another and grew along similar paths. When they settled in Paris, their apartment became the center for all who wished to know about modern painting: about Cezanne, Picasso, Matisse, all of whose paintings hung in profusion on their walls.But what hangs together-- whether brother and sister, or a great art collection -- can come undone, and it is the glory of this joint biography that Wineapple so carefully and tenderly traces the forces -- sexual appetites and obsessions, intellectual competitions, the powerful dialectic between dependence and autonomy -- which led to an absolute rupture between Leo and Gertrude, a rupture so complete that they never talked or wrote to one another again, for a period of thirty years. In those thirty years Gertrude became a central force in modern literature, while Leo subsided from the world into fad diets and unfinished projects. And yet, and yet: Wineapple does not sit in judgement, and it is the triumph of this book that Leo's many failures are as human, and as touching, and Gertrude's many successes: the reader ends up seeing ythe weaknesses of both, yet greatly admiring both. The subject of the book, finally, is not Gertrude and Leo, but the strange, tender, and torrential emotions that run between brothers and sisters, and the many routes through life which lead either to social failure or social success.