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The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius: Selections Annotated and Explained Russell McNeil, PhD Editor, Malaspina Great Books In 1862 the English literary critic and poet Matthew Arnold described Marcus Aurelius as "the most beautiful figure in history." The Stoicism of Aurelius is grounded in rationality and rests solidly on an ethical approach rooted in nature. Stoicism promises real happiness and joy in this life and a serenity that can never be soured by personal misfortune. This philosophy has universal appeal with practical implications on problems ranging from climate change and terrorism to the personal management of sickness, aging, depression and addiction. I truly believe that the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius has much to offer us now...(Click on book cover for more)

Category:	Modern Literature
Name:	Gertrude Stein - GLBT Series, Feminist Series
Birth Year:	1874
Death Year:	1946
Representative Image:
Biography, Lectures, and Research Links:	Biography - GLBT Series, Feminist Series Blog Gertrude Stein SEARCH NOW: by title by author Gertrude Stein (February 3, 1874 - July 29, 1946) - portrait by Picasso (1906) - was an American writer, poet, feminist, playwright, and catalyst in the development of modern art and literature, who spent most of her life in France. Born in Allegheny, Pennsylvania (now the North Side of Pittsburgh), her family moved to Vienna and then Paris when she was three. After returning almost two years later, she was educated in California, graduating from Radcliffe College in 1897 followed by two years at Johns Hopkins Medical School. In 1902 she moved to France during the height of artistic creativity gathering in Montparnasse. From 1903 to 1912 she lived in Paris with her brother Leo, who became an accomplished art critic. Gertrude Stein was a lesbian. She met her life-long companion Alice B. Toklas in 1907; Alice moved in with Leo and Gertrude in 1909. During her whole life, Gertrude Stein was supported by a stipend from her family's business. In Paris she started to write in earnest: novels, plays, stories, librettos and poems. Increasingly, she developed her own highly idiosyncratic, playful, sometimes repetitive and sometimes humorous style. Typical quotes are: "Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose" and "Out of kindness comes redness and out of rudeness comes rapid same question, out of an eye comes research, out of selection comes painful cattle," as well as "The change of color is likely and a difference a very little difference is prepared. Sugar is not a vegetable." These stream-of-consciousness experiments, rhythmical word-paintings, were designed to evoke "the excitingness of pure being" and can be seen as an answer to Cubism in literature. They were loved by the avant-garde, but mainstream success initially remained elusive. She and her brother compiled one of the first collections of Cubist art. She owned early works of Pablo Picasso (who became a friend and painted her portrait), Henri Matisse, Andre Derain plus other young painters. When England declared war on Germany in World War I, Stein and Toklas were visiting with Alfred North Whitehead in England. They returned to France and volunteered to drive supplies to French hospitals; they were later honored by the French government for this work. By the 1920's her salon at 27 Rue de Fleurus, with walls covered by avant-garde paintings, attracted many of the great artists and writers including Ernest Hemingway, Thornton Wilder, Sherwood Anderson and Georges Braque. She coined the term "Lost Generation" for some of these ex-patriate American writers. Extremely charming, eloquent, cheerful and overweight, indeed cheerfully overweight, she had a large circle of friends and tirelessly promoted herself. Her judgements in literature and art were highly influential. In 1932, using an accessible style to accommodate the ordinary reading public, she wrote The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas; the book would become her first best-seller. Despite the title, it was really her own autobiography. She described herself as extremely confident, one might even say arrogant, always convinced that she was a genius. She was disdainful of mundane tasks and Alice Toklas managed everyday affairs. The style of the autobiography was quite similar to that of The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook, which was actually written by Alice and contains several unusual recipes such as one for hashish Fudge (also called Alice B. Toklas brownies). Gertrude Stein wrote in long hand, typically about half an hour per day. Alice B. Toklas would collect the pages, type them up and deal with the publishing. Indeed, Toklas founded the publisher "Plain Editions" to distribute Stein's work. Today, most manuscripts are kept in the Beinecke Library at Yale University. In the manuscript for Stanzas in Meditation, written in 1932, every word "may" and "May" is crossed out and replaced by "can" respectively "day" or "today". This change had been forced by Toklas out of jealousy after having read Stein's early and unpublished short novel Q.E.D. which recounts a love affair between Stein and a woman called May Bookstaver. Politically, Gertrude Stein was deeply conservative; she regarded the jobless as lazy, opposed Franklin Roosevelt and his New Deal and supported Franco in the Spanish Civil War. She would later start a project of translating speeches by Vichy regime leader Petain into English. With the outbreak of World Was II, Stein and Toklas moved to a rented country home in Bilignin, Ain, in the Rhone-Alpes region. Referred to only as "Americans" by their neighbors, the Jewish Gertrude and Alice escaped persecution probably because of their friendship to Bernard Fay, a gay collaborator with the Vichy regime with connections to the Gestapo. When Bernard Fay was sentenced to hard labor for life after the war, Gertrude and Alice campaigned for his release. Several years later, Alice would contribute money to Fay's escape from prison. After the war, Gertrude's status in Paris grew when she was visited by many young American soldiers. She died of stomach cancer in Paris on July 29, 1946 and was interred there in Le Pere Lachaise Cemetery. Several of Stein's writings have been set by composers, including Virgil Thompson's operas Four Saints in Three Acts, The Mother of Us All, and James Tenney's skillful if short setting of Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose as a canon dedicated to Philip Corner, beginning with "a" on an upbeat and continuing so that each repition shuffles the words, eg. "a/rose is a rose/is a rose is/a rose is a/rose". Selected Works, ordered by publication date: Three lives, (1909); Tender buttons: objects, food, rooms; (1914); Geography and Plays, (1922); The Making of Americans, written 1906-1908, published 1925); Four Saints in Three Acts, (libretto, 1929: music by Virgil Thomson, 1934); Useful Knowledge, (1929); How to Write, (1931); The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, (1933); Lectures in America, (1935); The Geographical History of America or the Relation of Human Nature to the Human Mind, (1936); Everybody's Autobiography, (1937); Picasso, (1938); Ida; a novel, (1941); Wars I Have Seen, (1945); Reflections on the Atom Bomb, (1946); The Mother of Us All, (libretto, published 1949: music by Virgil Thompson 1947; Last Operas and Plays, (1949); The Things as They Are, (written as Q.E.D. in 1903, published 1950); Patriarchal Poetry, (1953); Alphabets and Birthdays (1957). [This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License and uses material adapted in whole or in part from the Wikipedia article on Gertrude Stein.] The Great Books: Gertrude Stein Please browse our Amazon list of titles about Gertrude Stein. For rare and hard to find works we recommend our Alibris list of titles about Gertrude Stein. Post Comments, Questions or Suggestions! This database is maintained by Malaspina Great Books.
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Records from Related Period and Category:	Modern Literature

About this Database:

This web page is part of a biographical database on Great Ideas. These are living ideas that have shaped, defined and directed world culture for over 2,500 years. By definition the Great Ideas are radical. As such they are sometimes misread, or distorted by popular simplifications. Understanding a Great Idea demands personal engagement. Our selection of Great Ideas is drawn from literature and philosophy, science, art, music, theatre, and cinema. We also include biographies of pivotal historical and religious figures, as well as contributions from women and other historically under-represented minorities. The result is an integrated multi-cultural and multi-disciplinary database built upon the framework of the always controversial Great Books Core List published in 1940 by the late Great Books Pioneer Mortimer Adler (1902-2001). Most of the works on that list are available in the 60 volume Great Books of the Western World.