Gertrude Stein: Paris, Modernism & the Reinvention of Language

Gertrude Stein did not want language to behave itself. She repeated words until they began to sound unfamiliar, loosened sentences from conventional grammar, stretched stories across hundreds of pages, wrote portraits that barely resembled biographies, and treated language almost as though it were paint. Meaning did not always arrive immediately. Sometimes it accumulated through rhythm, sometimes it shifted through repetition, and sometimes Stein seemed less interested in telling readers what something meant than in making them notice how words themselves behave.

Born on February 3, 1874, in Allegheny, Pennsylvania, Stein became one of the most recognizable figures of twentieth-century modernism. She was a novelist, poet, playwright, essayist, art collector, patron, conversationalist, and cultural provocateur whose Paris home became a meeting place for some of the most adventurous artists and writers of her era. Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Juan Gris, and many others passed through the world surrounding Stein and her longtime partner, Alice B. Toklas.

Yet Stein was never important merely because famous people visited her. She was attempting something equally radical in literature. While painters around her were breaking objects into planes, questioning perspective, and abandoning the expectation that a painting should faithfully imitate visible reality, Stein was asking whether writing had to imitate ordinary speech, chronological time, or conventional storytelling. The result could be difficult, funny, maddening, hypnotic, and strangely beautiful. More than a century later, Gertrude Stein can still make a sentence feel like an unexplored object.

🌎 An American Childhood

Gertrude Stein was born in Allegheny, Pennsylvania, now part of Pittsburgh, into a family of German-Jewish ancestry. Her early childhood was unusually mobile, with the Stein family spending time in Europe before eventually settling in Oakland, California, where Gertrude grew up with her siblings.

Loss entered her life early. Her mother died when Stein was fourteen, and her father died several years later. Her oldest brother, Michael, then assumed responsibility for the younger members of the family. Stein eventually left California for the East Coast, where she entered an intellectual world that would profoundly shape her development. She had not yet become the famous expatriate surrounded by paintings in Paris; first she became a student fascinated by the workings of the human mind.

🧠 Studying Psychology with William James

Stein studied at the Harvard Annex, later known as Radcliffe College, during the 1890s. One of her most important teachers was the philosopher and psychologist William James, whose investigations of consciousness, attention, habit, and perception strongly influenced the young Stein.

Stein participated in psychological experiments and became interested in automatic behavior and the relationship between thought and language. Those interests did not disappear when she abandoned an academic career. Instead, they migrated into literature. Her later writing repeatedly examines personality, perception, repetition, and the way habitual behavior can reveal character.

Rather than constructing people primarily through dramatic events, Stein often returned to patterns: the things someone repeatedly says, does, notices, avoids, and eventually becomes. For Stein, repetition would develop not as a failure of language but as one of its central creative possibilities.

🩺 Johns Hopkins and the Medical Career That Never Happened

After her work at Radcliffe, Stein entered Johns Hopkins Medical School in Baltimore. For a time, medicine appeared to offer a possible professional future. She studied anatomy and clinical subjects, but her enthusiasm declined, and she ultimately left without completing the degree.

The departure proved decisive. Instead of becoming a physician, Stein moved increasingly toward writing, art, and Europe. The intellectual habits she had developed through psychology and medicine remained with her, but they would now be applied to human character through fiction rather than diagnosis.

Stein remained fascinated by types of people, recurring behavior, consciousness, and the difficulty of describing another person accurately. Those questions could have remained scientific. She made them literary.

🇫🇷 Paris

In 1903, Stein moved to Paris, joining her brother Leo. She would live in France for most of the rest of her life, and the decision placed her inside one of the great cultural transformations of modern art.

Paris at the beginning of the twentieth century was crowded with artists challenging long-established assumptions about painting, sculpture, literature, music, and design. Impressionism had already unsettled academic traditions. Post-Impressionism had pushed further, while Fauvism, Cubism, abstraction, and other experimental movements were beginning to reshape the visual arts.

Stein arrived at exactly the right moment. She did not stand outside that transformation and observe it politely. She joined it.

🖼️ 27 Rue de Fleurus

Gertrude and Leo Stein lived at 27 rue de Fleurus, where they began assembling a remarkable collection of modern art. Their walls eventually contained works by artists who were still considered shocking, strange, or simply incomprehensible by many viewers. The Steins became early supporters of Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso, purchasing their work before either artist had achieved anything resembling his later fame.

Saturday evenings at rue de Fleurus gradually developed into gatherings where artists, writers, collectors, expatriates, and curious visitors could encounter one another and see paintings unavailable in museums. At a time when much avant-garde art remained difficult to see publicly, the Stein apartment became an important alternative exhibition space.

The salon has become legendary, but it was not simply a fashionable literary party. It was a laboratory of modernism. Visitors argued, artists compared work, collectors discovered painters, writers encountered unfamiliar ideas, and Stein observed all of it.

🎨 Matisse, Picasso and the New Art

The Stein family’s relationships with Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso became particularly important. At a time when their paintings provoked confusion and ridicule, the Steins were willing to look seriously. They purchased their work, displayed it, introduced other collectors to it, and helped create a network through which the new art could circulate.

Stein recognized something in experimental painting that corresponded to her own ambitions as a writer. A portrait did not have to reproduce a face exactly. A painting did not have to follow conventional perspective. An object could be represented from multiple angles. Likewise, perhaps a novel did not require a conventional plot, a sentence did not need to move predictably, and character could emerge through repetition rather than explanation.

Modern painting showed Stein that representation could be dismantled and rebuilt. She began doing something similar with words.

👩‍🎨 Picasso’s Portrait of Gertrude Stein

One of the most enduring images of Stein was created by Pablo Picasso between 1905 and 1906. Stein later claimed that she sat for Picasso dozens of times. Whatever the exact number, the portrait became important to both artist and subject. Picasso eventually painted out her face, left the work unfinished for a period, and then completed it without Stein sitting before him.

The resulting portrait is often regarded as a transitional work pointing toward the increasingly radical simplification and restructuring of the human figure that would soon appear in Picasso’s art. Stein kept the portrait throughout her life, displaying it prominently in her Paris home and taking it with her during World War II. It eventually entered the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art through her bequest.

The portrait became almost inseparable from Stein’s public identity. Picasso transformed Stein into an icon of modern painting while Stein, in her own work, was attempting to perform a comparable transformation of literary portraiture.

✍️ Three Lives

One of Stein’s most important early books was Three Lives, published in 1909. The work contains three stories centered on women: “The Good Anna,” “Melanctha,” and “The Gentle Lena.” Rather than relying primarily upon dramatic plotting, Stein builds character through recurring phrases, rhythms, speech patterns, and repeated descriptions.

The technique reflects her fascination with habit. People reveal themselves through what they do repeatedly. The same thought returns, the same frustration reappears, and a familiar phrase changes slightly each time it is spoken. Meaning accumulates through variation.

“Melanctha,” the longest and most frequently discussed of the three stories, became particularly significant in Stein’s development. Modern readers also have to confront the book’s racial language and representations, which reflect both Stein’s experimental ambitions and troubling assumptions from the period in which she wrote. Stein can be innovative and uncomfortable at the same time, and serious reading requires allowing both realities to remain visible.

🏠 The Making of Americans

If Three Lives announced Stein’s difference, The Making of Americans demonstrated how far she was willing to push it. Written largely during the first decade of the twentieth century but not fully published until 1925, the enormous work examines generations of two American families while repeatedly attempting to categorize human personality.

The novel can feel less like a conventional family saga than a prolonged experiment in consciousness. Sentences stretch, ideas recur, descriptions return with slight modifications, and characters gradually become patterns. The reader experiences personality through accumulation rather than through sudden revelation.

Many readers find the book difficult, and that difficulty is not accidental. Stein was trying to slow reading down until the reader could no longer glide through language automatically. She wanted words to become noticeable again.

🔁 Repetition Without Repeating

Stein became famous for repetition, but she resisted the idea that genuine repetition was even possible. A repeated word occurs at a different moment, the context has shifted, and the reader has changed slightly because the word has already been encountered once before. The second appearance is therefore not identical to the first.

This helps explain why Stein could use the same phrase repeatedly without believing that she was merely saying the same thing again. Repetition becomes movement. A useful comparison is a song chorus: the words return, but the emotional experience changes because everything surrounding them has changed.

Stein applied something similar to prose and poetry. The sentence does not merely carry information forward. It circles, accumulates, echoes, and changes through recurrence.

🌹 “A Rose Is a Rose Is a Rose Is a Rose”

No phrase is more closely associated with Gertrude Stein than “Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose.” The line appeared in her poem “Sacred Emily” and became one of the best-known examples of her fascination with repetition.

Its apparent simplicity is deceptive. The word “rose” has accumulated centuries of symbolism and can suggest romance, beauty, poetry, femininity, fragrance, nature, secrecy, religious imagery, or countless other associations. Stein strips the word back through repetition until a rose begins to become strange again.

That was part of what she wanted language to do. Common words can become so familiar that people stop actually hearing them. Stein wanted readers to hear them again.

🧺 Tender Buttons

Published in 1914, Tender Buttons remains one of Stein’s most famous and most puzzling books. The work is divided broadly into sections involving objects, food, and rooms. Familiar things appear—a carafe, a box, a chair, roast beef, umbrellas, cups—but Stein refuses to describe them in conventional ways.

Instead, language moves through sound, association, rhythm, repetition, grammatical disruption, and unexpected combinations. The result can feel like Cubism translated into prose. The comparison should not be taken too literally, but the connection is useful. Cubist painters dismantled familiar objects and reconstructed them according to new visual relationships, while Stein dismantled descriptive language and rebuilt it according to new verbal relationships.

A cup no longer needs to be described primarily by its shape or function. It can generate sound, association, rhythm, memory, and a chain of language. The object becomes an occasion for words rather than simply something words must identify.

❤️ Alice B. Toklas

Alice B. Toklas entered Stein’s life in Paris in 1907, beginning a partnership that would last until Stein’s death almost forty years later. Toklas became Stein’s companion, household manager, reader, typist, organizer, defender, and an essential participant in the social world surrounding her work.

Their relationship also became part of Stein’s writing. Domestic life, private language, affection, jealousy, routine, and companionship appear in various forms throughout her work. Together, Stein and Toklas constructed a life that was highly unconventional for their era while also developing its own deeply settled domestic rhythms.

The contrast is characteristic. From the outside, they looked radical. Inside the household, routines mattered enormously.

🛋️ Alice and the Salon

The famous Paris salon depended upon both women, although their roles were often different. Stein tended to dominate conversations with writers and male artists, while Toklas frequently spent time with the wives and partners who accompanied them. The arrangement reflected some of the gender conventions of the period even within a household that otherwise challenged conventional expectations.

Toklas also protected Stein’s time and managed much of the practical work surrounding her increasingly complicated life. Famous visitors came and went, but meals still had to be prepared, letters answered, manuscripts typed, and travel arranged. A literary legend requires ordinary logistics, and Toklas handled many of them.

🖼️ Writing Portraits with Words

Stein developed an unusual form she called the portrait. Instead of describing what someone looked like or telling the story of a life, she tried to capture something about the person through rhythm and verbal pattern.

She wrote portraits of artists, friends, acquaintances, and public figures, and the technique resembles her broader theory of character. A person is not simply a list of facts. Something else exists in the rhythm of presence: how someone moves, how someone speaks, and what pattern that person creates in a room.

Stein wanted writing to approach those qualities without becoming conventional biography. Her portraits are therefore often difficult to explain because they are meant to be experienced.

🎭 Four Saints in Three Acts

Stein’s experimentation extended naturally into theater. Her collaboration with American composer Virgil Thomson produced Four Saints in Three Acts, an opera centered loosely around saints including Teresa of Ávila and Ignatius of Loyola.

The work disregards conventional dramatic logic. Language repeats, shifts, circles, and frequently seems to operate according to musical rather than narrative principles. That made opera an ideal form for Stein because music had always been implicit in her writing through repetition, rhythm, tempo, sound, and pause.

When Four Saints in Three Acts received its major American production in 1934, it also attracted attention for its all-Black cast, an unusual and significant choice in American opera at the time. Stein’s strange language had found a stage.

📖 The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas

For years, Stein was famous among artists and writers without being widely read by the general public. That changed dramatically with The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, published in 1933.

The title itself contains the joke. The book presents itself as Alice’s autobiography, but Stein wrote it. By narrating her own life through the supposed voice of her partner, Stein created something between memoir, portrait, comedy, gossip, cultural history, and self-mythology.

The book was far more accessible than works such as Tender Buttons or The Making of Americans, and readers embraced it. It became a bestseller and brought Stein a new level of fame. She had spent decades reinventing language; now she had written the book that made the public want to meet her.

🗣️ Creating Gertrude Stein

Stein understood self-presentation exceptionally well. Long before modern celebrity culture, she recognized that writers could become characters in the public imagination. Her short hair, distinctive clothes, commanding physical presence, Picasso portrait, relationship with Alice, crowded Paris walls, pronouncements about art, and stream of famous visitors all became parts of the public image of Gertrude Stein.

She did not invent all of this artificially, but she understood how effectively biography could become mythology. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas accelerated the process because Stein essentially wrote herself into cultural history while pretending someone else was doing the writing.

It was autobiography by ventriloquism, and it worked.

🇺🇸 Returning to America

The success of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas led to Stein’s celebrated American lecture tour in 1934 and 1935. She had been living abroad for decades, and by the time she returned, she was no longer an obscure expatriate writer. She was a literary celebrity.

Audiences came partly because they wanted to understand the difficult modernist whose work had already become legendary for its strangeness. Stein lectured about writing, art, language, America, and her own creative methods. The tour allowed her to perform her public identity directly, and readers who found her prose bewildering could hear the voice behind it.

The experience also sharpened Stein’s complicated relationship with America. She had needed Paris to become herself, but she never stopped thinking about what it meant to be American.

🚗 America from a Distance

Many expatriate writers discover that leaving a country can make the country more visible, and Stein was no exception. Living in France allowed her to think repeatedly about American personality, American speech, American history, American habits, and the strange speed of American life.

The Making of Americans announces the obsession directly in its title. Stein did not abandon America when she moved to Paris. She turned it into a subject. Distance made observation possible, and Paris gave her a vantage point from which America could become unfamiliar enough to examine.

🥃 Hemingway and the Lost Generation

Stein’s relationship with Ernest Hemingway became one of the most famous literary friendships of expatriate Paris. The young Hemingway visited her home, discussed writing and painting, and initially regarded Stein as an important mentor. Their friendship later deteriorated, and both writers eventually produced accounts that were hardly impartial.

Stein nevertheless became permanently connected with the phrase “Lost Generation.” Hemingway used a version of the phrase as an epigraph to The Sun Also Rises, attributing it to Stein. Later accounts connected Stein’s remark to a French expression she had heard concerning young people shaped by World War I.

Whether or not Stein literally invented the phrase, she helped popularize a label that became inseparable from the expatriate writers associated with postwar Paris. Ironically, Stein herself never fit particularly neatly inside the Lost Generation. She was older, she had arrived earlier, and by the time Hemingway and Fitzgerald appeared, she had already been building her strange Parisian world for years.

📚 Stein and the Writers Around Her

Stein’s salon brought her into contact with a remarkable range of literary figures, including Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sherwood Anderson, Ezra Pound, Thornton Wilder, and Ford Madox Ford. Some became close friends, while others passed through her circle more briefly.

Stein could be generous, encouraging, domineering, competitive, dismissive, and extraordinarily certain of her own judgment. Friendships sometimes became feuds, and admiration could turn into rivalry. This was not incidental to her literary world. Modernism was built not only through masterpieces but through arguments, friendships, introductions, magazines, publishers, gossip, exhibitions, cafés, salons, and personal loyalties. Stein stood near the center of that network for years.

🎨 Gertrude and Leo Separate

The famous Stein art collection did not remain intact. Gertrude and Leo gradually developed different artistic tastes and personal disagreements, and their relationship deteriorated. When Leo eventually left the shared household, the collection was divided.

Gertrude remained especially committed to Picasso, while Leo preferred other directions in modern art. The split changed the world of rue de Fleurus. Alice became increasingly central to Gertrude’s household, while the salon evolved from the environment Gertrude and Leo had originally created together. The paintings had helped establish Stein’s reputation, but writing increasingly took over.

🧩 What Does Stein’s Writing Mean?

Readers often approach Stein with the assumption that a hidden message must be decoded. Sometimes that approach creates unnecessary frustration because not every Stein sentence operates like a puzzle with one correct solution.

Meaning can come through sound, rhythm, repetition, juxtaposition, grammatical tension, or the expectation created by one word and disrupted by the next. Reading Stein can therefore resemble listening to music more than solving an equation. The reader may notice pattern before explanation.

That does not mean meaning disappears. It means meaning is being produced differently.

🎼 Writing as Music

Stein’s language often becomes easier to understand when read aloud. On the page, repetition can appear static, but in the voice it becomes rhythmic. A phrase accelerates, another slows down, a repeated word gathers pressure, and sounds begin answering one another.

This musical quality helps explain Stein’s attraction to opera and performance. Her prose was never entirely silent. She heard sentences physically, with the mouth and ear playing essential roles in the experience of reading.

Perhaps this is why some readers who struggle with Stein visually discover something unexpected when they speak the sentences. The words stop behaving only like information and begin behaving like sound.

📰 Fame Arrives Late

Stein spent much of her life believing strongly in the importance of work that relatively few people were actually reading. That gap between confidence and public recognition could be enormous. She was already famous as a personality in avant-garde circles, but literary fame on a broad scale arrived much later.

The success of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas changed that. Suddenly the woman whose writing had often been mocked as incomprehensible became a recognizable celebrity.

There is something deeply Stein-like about the way it happened. Her breakthrough book pretended to be written by someone else, allowing the great self-promoter to achieve mass fame through an autobiography disguised as another person’s autobiography. Identity had become another formal experiment.

⚠️ Stein During World War II

The years of World War II remain among the most complicated parts of Stein’s biography. Stein and Toklas were both Jewish and remained in France during the German occupation, spending much of the period outside Paris. Their survival has prompted considerable historical investigation, particularly because of Stein’s friendship with Bernard Faÿ, a French academic and translator who became associated with the collaborationist Vichy regime.

Stein’s wartime political judgments have also generated serious criticism and debate. She expressed admiration for Marshal Philippe Pétain at points, despite the Vichy government’s authoritarianism and its participation in the persecution and deportation of Jews. Historians have examined how Stein’s personal loyalties, political judgments, self-preservation, contrarian instincts, and relationship with Faÿ intersected during these years.

The subject resists a neat heroic narrative. Stein and Toklas were vulnerable Jewish women living in dangerous circumstances, while Stein also maintained relationships and expressed views that remain deeply troubling. Both realities belong in the story.

🐩 Gertrude, Alice and Their Dogs

The public image of Stein and Toklas often includes dogs, especially their famous white poodle, Basket. Photographs of the couple at home offer an intriguing contrast with Stein’s reputation as a forbidding modernist.

Here was the supposed destroyer of conventional language sitting comfortably at home with paintings on the walls, Alice nearby, a dog occupying the furniture, dinner to think about, and correspondence waiting to be answered. The avant-garde also has to live somewhere, and Stein’s domestic world was as real as the literary mythology surrounding it.

📚 Preserving Her Own Archive

Stein understood early that her papers would matter. In 1937, she began arranging for manuscripts and correspondence to be preserved at Yale. Her materials included manuscripts of major works as well as correspondence involving Picasso, Matisse, Hemingway, Juan Gris, William James, and many others.

This was not false modesty. Stein believed she belonged to literary history and intended to make sure literary history had the documents.

Today the Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas Papers at Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library provide an enormous record of Stein’s creative process, relationships, manuscripts, notebooks, photographs, correspondence, and domestic life. For someone so obsessed with repetition and process, the archive is particularly revealing because readers can see writing become writing.

🕯️ Gertrude Stein’s Final Years

After the liberation of France, Stein returned to Paris. She remained intellectually active, continued writing, and resumed contact with friends and visitors. By then, she was no longer simply part of modernism. She had become part of its history.

Gertrude Stein died in Neuilly-sur-Seine on July 27, 1946, at the age of seventy-two. Alice B. Toklas lived for another two decades, while Stein’s manuscripts and correspondence continued moving into institutional collections. Her books remained available for rediscovery by writers and readers encountering them in radically different literary climates.

Each generation seemed capable of finding a different Stein.

📖 Why Gertrude Stein Still Matters

Stein matters because she changed what writers could imagine doing with a sentence. Her influence does not depend upon everyone enjoying The Making of Americans from beginning to end or understanding every line of Tender Buttons. Experimental writers rarely matter because everybody imitates them completely. They matter because they expand possibility.

After Stein, repetition could become structure rather than error, grammar could become material, portraiture could abandon physical description, narrative could detach itself from chronology, and words could be investigated for sound as intensely as meaning. A sentence could refuse to hurry.

Stein created permission for later writers to use language differently.

🔄 Stein and the World of Remix

There is something surprisingly contemporary about Stein’s fascination with repetition and recombination. Modern culture constantly reuses language. Memes repeat phrases with altered contexts, songs sample earlier recordings, digital communication circulates fragments detached from their original sources, advertising repeats slogans until words become inseparable from products, and social media transforms familiar sentences by placing them beside new images and audiences.

Stein understood long ago that repetition does not preserve meaning perfectly. It changes it because every new context produces a new relationship. The same words become different because their surroundings are different.

That insight feels considerably less strange now than it did in 1914.

🧠 Reading Stein Without Fear

Stein’s reputation for difficulty can frighten readers before they begin, but it helps to abandon the idea that every sentence must be translated immediately into conventional prose. Reading slowly and aloud can reveal things that silent reading hides.

Notice repeated sounds, watch where grammar behaves unexpectedly, pay attention to which words seem to attract one another, and observe what changes when a phrase returns. Meaning may arrive gradually, while some passages may remain strange.

That is allowed. Stein did not want literature to function only as a delivery system for information. She wanted reading itself to become noticeable.

🌹 A Rose After Gertrude Stein

Perhaps Stein’s greatest trick was making ordinary words difficult again. A rose had been written about for centuries before she arrived. Poets had already made it beautiful, romantic, symbolic, fragile, passionate, and almost hopelessly familiar.

Stein repeated the word until all that accumulated literary decoration began to wobble. Suddenly the reader sees the word instead of simply passing through it.

That moment contains much of Stein’s project. Language surrounds us constantly, and we use it automatically. Stein interrupts the automatic response and asks us to look again.

🎂 Remembering Gertrude Stein

Gertrude Stein was born on February 3, 1874, in Pennsylvania and spent much of her life constructing one of the strangest and most influential literary careers of the twentieth century. She studied psychology with William James, entered medical school, abandoned medicine, moved to Paris, collected radical new art, befriended Picasso and Matisse, built a famous salon, shared nearly four decades with Alice B. Toklas, influenced younger writers, quarreled with some of them, wrote enormous experimental novels, dismantled ordinary description in Tender Buttons, collaborated on opera, became unexpectedly famous through The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, toured America as a celebrity, survived World War II in France, and preserved an extraordinary archive for future readers.

Her writing remains divisive. Some readers hear music where others hear repetition, while some see revolutionary experiments with language where others see deliberate obscurity. Stein would probably have been delighted that the argument continues because she never wanted language to disappear quietly behind meaning.

She wanted readers to notice words, hear them, turn them around, repeat them, and encounter something familiar until familiarity stopped protecting them from surprise. Gertrude Stein spent a lifetime making language strange, and once language becomes strange, we may finally begin paying attention to it again.

Sacred Emily

Argonauts.
That is plenty.
Cunning saxon symbol.
Symbol of beauty.
Thimble of everything.
Cunning clover thimble.
Cunning of everything.
Cunning of thimble.
Cunning cunning.
Place in pets.
Night town.
Night town a glass.
Color mahogany.
Color mahogany center.
Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose.
Loveliness extreme.
Extra gaiters.
Loveliness extreme.
Sweetest ice-cream.
Page ages page ages page ages.
Wiped Wiped wire wire.
Sweeter than peaches and pears and cream.
Wiped wire wiped wire
Extra extreme.
Put measure treasure.
Measure treasure.
Tables track.
Nursed.
Dough.
That will do.
Cup or cup or.
Excessively illigitimate.
Pussy pussy pussy what what.
Current secret sneezers.
Ever.
Mercy for a dog.
Medal make medal.
Able able able.
A go to green and a letter spoke a go to green or praise or
Worships worships worships.
Door.
Do or.
Table linen.
Wet spoil.
Wet spoil gaiters and knees and little spools little spools or ready silk lining.
Suppose misses misses.
Curls to butter.
Curls.
Curls.
Settle stretches.
See at till.
Louise.
Sunny.
Sail or.
Sail or rustle.
Mourn in morning.
The way to say.
Patter.
Deal own a.
Robber.
A high b and a perfect sight.
Little things singer.
Jane.
Aiming.
Not in description.
Day way.
A blow is delighted.

-Gertrude Stein, born February 3, 1874 in Allegheny, Pennsylvania