"...there you are privileged, nobody can do anything but take care of you, that is the way I was and that is the way I still am, and any one who is like that necessarily liked it. I did and I do."
The fifth and youngest child of the Daniel and Amelia Stein family, Gertrude was born on February 3, 1874 into upper middle class surroundings in Allegheny, Pennsylvania.
When she was 3 years old the family moved to Vienna and then on to Paris before returning to America in late 1878.
"So I was five years old when we came back to America having known Austrian German and French French, and now American English, a nice world if there is enough of it, and more or less there always is."
Her father moved the family to Oakland, California soon after their return. Her brother Leo, 2 years her senior, and Gertrude found like interests and became close allies through much of their early lives. Gertrude was 8 when she made her first attempt at writing. Reading became an obsession for her beginning with Shakespeare and books on natural history. Gertrude's love affair with words would later reveal itself in her own works. In school she was fascinated with the structuring of sentences.
"I suppose other things may be more exciting to others...I like the feeling the everlasting feeling of sentences as they diagram themselves."
In 1891 her father died suddenly, and the oldest brother Michael assumed the position of earning a living for the family. The Steins moved to San Francisco where Gertrude became intrigued by the theater and opera...a passion she would continue after she moved to Baltimore in 1892 to live with a wealthy aunt.
"...how strange it was for me coming from a rather desperate inner life I had been living for the last few years to a cheerful life of all aunts and uncles."
Gertrude entered Radcliffe College in 1893. As a student she developed a special philosophical relationship with her teacher, William James. James told her, "I hope you will pardon me if you recognize some features of my ideal student as your own."
On a particularly nice spring day during final exams in James' course she wrote at the top of her paper...
"Dear Professor James, I am sorry but really I do not feel a bit like an examination paper in philosophy today."
The next day she received a postcard from James saying,
"I understand perfectly how you feel I often feel like that myself."
and then gave her the highest mark in his course.
With philosophy and psychology courses behind her, Gertrude decided on a career in medicine and enrolled at Johns Hopkins University. She later studied medicine in Europe and eventually dismissed the whole idea. Wanderlust had captured her attention as she traveled through Italy, Germany, and England...living for awhile with brother Leo in London.
She returned to America to live with friends in New York. It was here that she wrote her first novel "Q.E.D.". It would, for some reason, be lost for 30 years and not be published until 4 years after her death under the title of "Things As They Are".
Leo Stein moved to Paris and took up residence at