Mount Vernon Literary Tour: Gertrude Stein

Be Here Stories

The Mount Vernon Literary Tour is created by The Baltimore National Heritage Area (BNHA), which promotes, preserves, and enhances Baltimore's historic and cultural legacy and natural resources for current and future generations. A site-by-site walking tour of this and other destinations is available at www.https://bnha.visit.zone/ Located at 215 East Biddle Street Orphaned at age 17, Gertrude Stein (b. 1874, d. 1946) moved to Baltimore in 1892 to live with relatives. Within the straitlaced German-Jewish community, she found unconventional role models like her uncle, photographer David Bachrach, and Dr. Claribel Cone, the epitome of an independent woman. Stein lived in this house while attending Johns Hopkins medical school. A failure as a med student, she instead moved to Paris and became one of the most influential cultural figures of the 20th century. She championed modernism, boldly experimenting with language in her literary works. Her famous salon brought together writers and artists who profoundly changed art and literature, from Picasso to Fitzgerald. She lived openly as a lesbian at a time when homosexuality was taboo. Stein wrote caustically about Baltimore yet acknowledged her formative experience here. In the end, she claimed Baltimore as her hometown, noting, “after all everybody has to come from somewhere.”