Gertrude Stein (1874-1946) was an American writer who settled in Paris in 1903 and made her salon a meeting point for Picasso, Matisse, Hemingway and Fitzgerald, coining the phrase lost generation for the last of these. She studied psychology under William James before turning to a radically repetitive prose that treated sentences as objects rather than statements. Three Lives (1909) was her first published book.