"It was not what France gave you but what it did not take away from you that was important," Gertrude Stein once remarked by way of explaining her long-term residence in Paris. She had found in the French capital the privacy and freedom to live and write as she pleased. She was one of the most celebrated expatriates of her time, living in a standard of modest luxury with her lifetime companion, Alice B. Toklas. As the hostess of a well-publicized salon, Stein included among her friends and acquaintances many of the great and near-great men and women of her time--artists, writers, composers, critics, and publishers.

She needed two civilizations, she claimed: America had made her, but it was in Paris that she became a writer. It was, indeed, during her forty-three years abroad that she produced--and promoted--the idiosyncratic and experimental poems, plays, "word-portraits," and novels which admirers...