Gertrude Stein is, Indeed, the Creative Mind of the Century

During this era of change following World War I, prior social conventions were replaced with a new urge to discover the inclination of human thought. Film, business, psychology and much more bloomed from this era, but one of the best ways to understand an era is study its literature. I have read such writers of the modernist canon as James Joyce, E.E. Cummings, and Virginia Woolf. Their style of literature is replete with imagination, abstraction, and fascination, but the writer that best characterizes this period is Gertrude Stein. She herself said, "I have been the creative literary mind of the century."

Gertrude Stein was the master of modernism, which is the literary movement that arose out of this era. The modernists use d a technique that is called stream of consciousness, which is represented their concern with direct representation of the characters’ consciousness. The emphasis was on the pre-speech functions of the brain and is intended to reveal the psychic being. The writer uses direct intuitive thought before going through the logical functions of the brain.

Modernists’concept of narrative is based on this stream of consciousness technique. Gertrude Stein describes it best because she could describe the concept while using the very concept in her writing. "Narrative has been the telling of anything because there has been always has been a feeling the something followed another thing that there was succession in happening. In a kind of a way what has made the Old Testament such permanently good reading is that really in a way in the Old Testament writing there really was not any such thing there was not any succession of anything …. in the Old Testament writing there is really no actual conclusion that anything is progressing that one thing is succeeding happening is a narrative of anything, but more writing based on this thing most writing has been a real narrative writing a now everything is not that thing there is at present not a sense of anything being successively happening, moving in every direction beginning and ending is not really exciting, anything is anything, anything is happening … And this has come to be a natural thing in a perfectly natural way that the narrative of today is not narrative of succession as all the writing for a good many hundred years has been"

The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas is perhaps the greatest work by Gertrude Stein and of this era. Stein daringly took English prose to the limits of grammatical acceptability and, in the process, created a wonderfully obscure portrait of both human genius and the chaotic feelings of the era.

Gertrude Stein lived her life with "a passion for sentences." Gertrude Stein created sentences. She created sentences that repeated. She created sentences that changed only slightly. She created sentences with word play. She created sentences that captured the time. Gertrude Stein created sentences of the century.