The gatherings in the Stein home "brought together confluences of talent and thinking that would help define modernism in literature and art". Dedicated attendees included Pablo Picasso, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sinclair Lewis, Ezra Pound, Gavin Williamson, Thornton Wilder, Sherwood Anderson, Francis Cyril Rose, Bob Brown, René Crevel, Élisabeth de Gramont, Francis Picabia, Claribel Cone, Mildred Aldrich, Jane Peterson, Carl Van Vechten, Henri Matisse and Georges Braque.[4] Saturday evenings had been set as the fixed day and time for formal congregation so Stein could work at her writing uninterrupted by impromptu visitors.
It was Stein's partner Alice who became the de facto hostess for the wives and girlfriends of the artists in attendance, who met in a separate room. From "Alice Entertained the Wives" (New York Times, 1977): " 'I am a person acted upon, not a person who acts,' Alice told one of Gertrude's biographers (...) When guests showed up, Alice was called upon to entertain their wives. The ladies were, of course, 'second‐class citizens' "[53]
Gertrude attributed the beginnings of the Saturday evening salons to Matisse, as people began visiting to see his paintings and those of Cézanne: "Matisse brought people, everybody brought somebody, and they came at any time and it began to be a nuisance, and it was in this way that Saturday evenings began."[54]
Among Picasso's acquaintances who frequented the Saturday evenings were: Fernande Olivier (an artists’ model in a relationship with Picasso), Georges Braque (artist), André Derain (artist), Max Jacob (poet), Guillaume Apollinaire (poet and art critic), Marie Laurencin (artist, in a relationship with Apollinaire), Henri Rousseau (painter), and Joseph Stella (painter).[55]
Hemingway frequented Stein's salon, but the two had an uneven relationship. They began as close friends, with Hemingway admiring Stein as a mentor, but they later grew apart, especially after Stein called Hemingway "yellow" in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas.[12] Upon the birth of his son, Hemingway asked Stein to be the godmother of his child.[56] While Stein has been credited with inventing the term "Lost Generation" for those whose defining moment in time and coming of age had been World War I and its aftermath, there are at least three versions of the story that led to the phrase, two by Hemingway and one by Stein.[57]
During the summer of 1931, Stein advised the young composer and writer Paul Bowles to go to Tangier, where she and Alice had vacationed.
In 1938, Stein and Toklas moved from the rue de Fleurus to 5 rue Christine in the 6th arrondissement. For much of the war they sheltered in a house they had rented for several years in the hamlet of Bilignin in the commune of Belley (Ain), which was initially outside the area of direct German occupation in the Zone libre.
