Stein obscured the answer to the question of her reputation by snipping her origin story—the path she took from vulnerable striver to mythic figure—out of the official portrait. “Gertrude hated her own past,” Wade quotes Toklas as saying. “She referred to it as little as possible.” Relatively little is known about Stein’s early influences, the kind of childhood she had, how she felt about her mother and father. And yet, despite her grandiose, characteristically ungrammatical assertions of superiority and uniqueness—“think of the Bible and Homer think of Shakespeare and think of me”—Stein began life in the same mundane circumstances as everyone else.