Beginning of Essay
“I know I am” (Burnett 51). This response form was given in answer to the question “You think you are a genius?” posed to her by the French artist Henri Matisse. This was the epitome of Stein. Born in 1876, in Allegheny, Pennsylvania, Gertrude was the f ....

Middle of Essay
.... Harvard, she was taken under the wing of noted psychoanalyst, William James. James had an effect on Stein’s later writings as well. His method of “automatic writing, in which subjects wrote down their unedited, free-associative thoughts” (Gombar 42), was often the way Gertrude wrote many of her literary pieces. In 1897, she was denied her bachelor’s degree, but the next year, she graduated magna cum laude with the class of 1898. Because of high recommendations from James and her other professors, she was granted admission to Johns Hopkins Medical School, where her brother was also studying. They lived together in Baltimore, and Leo would g ....