Gertrude Stein

Raised in Oakland, California (the city she would later dismiss with 'there is no there there'), Stein studied psychology at Radcliffe under William James before drifting through Johns Hopkins medical school without finishing a degree. In 1903 she moved to Paris with her brother Leo and began amassing, on a modest income, a collection of paintings by then-unknown Picasso and Matisse that would help make their reputations.

Her rue de Fleurus apartment became modernism's living room, its walls hung floor to ceiling with Cubist canvases, its evenings crowded with the young writers she mentored and mercilessly critiqued. As a Jewish American lesbian in occupied France during the war, she and Alice B. Toklas survived only through the protection of a collaborationist friend, a debt historians still argue over.

She died of stomach cancer in Paris in 1946, Toklas at her side.