Three Lives

The celebrated author of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas explores the lives of three working-class women in this collection of stories.

In Three Lives, Gertrude Stein creates portraits of three women in a fictional mid-Atlantic town. There’s Anna, who flees hardship in Germany to become a housekeeper in America. Then there is Melanctha, a street-smart black girl on a quest for knowledge and power. And finally, there is Lena, a German immigrant whose life is shaped around her passive nature.

Published in 1909, Three Lives was Gertrude Stein’s first critically acclaimed work. It was influenced by the paintings of Cézanne, Picasso, and Matisse. In these pages, Stein experiments with language and literary form to tell the stories of three unforgettable women.