American author and art collector Gertrude Stein (Feb. 3, 1874 – July 27, 1946) is as celebrated for her distinctive non-narrative, non-linear writing as she is for her legendary, formidable presence. When Alice B. Toklas, the love of Stein’s life, first met the author in 1907, she wrote in her diary: “She was a golden brown presence, burned by the Tuscan sun and with a golden glint in her warm brown hair. She was dressed in a warm brown corduroy suit. She wore a large round coral brooch and when she talked, very little, or laughed, a good deal, I thought her voice came from this brooch. It was unlike anyone else’s voice — deep, full, velvety, like a great contralto’s, like two voices.” In 1903, Stein moved to Paris, where her regular Saturday evening salons for expatriate American artists and writers became a mecca of creative and intellectual life, featuring such icons as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, Ezra Pound... [http://thereconstructionists.org/page/14]