With publication of her new book — a dual biography of Gertrude and Leo Stein — due next month, Brenda Wineapple will give her colleagues a glimpse of what it was like
to research and write about the brother-sister team that collaborated on many of the great art and literary adventures of the early 20th century.
Wineapple, the Washington Irving Professor of Modern Literary and Historical Studies will discuss her upcoming Sister Brother Gertrude and Leo Stein in a faculty colloquium on Tuesday, April 2, at 4:30 p.m. in the Reamer Campus Center auditorium.
Coffee and tea will begin at 4 p.m.
During her more than six years of research, Wineapple discovered a wealth of new and rare material — an early Gertrude Stein manuscript, reports of her medical career, and never-before-examined papers of Leo's. Also along the way, Wineapple discovered a few of
the eccentric Leo's paintings with an art dealer who “didn't know what he had,” and she urged a reprinting of his 1947 Appreciation, for which she wrote an introduction.
Wineapple's book is the first completely researched biography of Gertrude Stein in two decades, and the first book ever written about Leo. In 1989, Wineapple wrote an acclaimed
biography, GenĂȘt: A Biography of Janet Flanner about the Paris correspondent to the New Yorker. It has been reprinted twice.
A member of the College's faculty since 1976, she earned her B.A. from Brandeis University, and her master's and Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
She has authored a number of articles on 19th and 20th century American and British literature and authors.
Among her fellowships and awards, she received a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship and was named a Donald C. Gallup Senior Fellow in American Literature at Yale's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, which holds many of the
Stein manuscripts.