Stein, Gertrude (b. Feb. 3, 1874, Allegheny City, Pa., U.S.—d. July 27, 1946, Neuilly-sur-Seine, France) U.S. avant-garde writer. Born to a wealthy family, Stein studied at Radcliffe College before moving to Paris, where from 1909 she lived with her companion Alice B. Toklas (1877— 1967). Their home was a salon for leading artists and writers, including Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Georges Braque, Sherwood Anderson, and
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Stein ► Steinmetz I 1817
Ernest Hemingway. An early sup¬ porter of Cubism, she tried to parallel its theories in her work, including the poetry volume Tender Buttons (1914). Her prose was characterized by a unique style employing repeti¬ tion, fragmentation, and use of the continuous present, especially in the immense novel The Making of Americans (written 1906-11, pub¬ lished 1928). Her only book to reach a wide public was The Autobiogra¬ phy of Alice B. Toklas (1933), actu¬ ally Stein’s own autobiography. Her other works include Four Saints in Three Acts (1934) and The Mother of Us All (1947), opera librettos scored by Virgil Thomson.
Stein \'shtln\, (Heinrich Friedrich) Karl, imperial baron vom und zum (b. Oct.
26, 1757, Nassau an der Lahn,
Nassau—d. June 29, 1831, Schloss Cappenberg, Westphalia) Prussian statesman. Bom into the imperial nobility, he entered the civil service in 1780. As minister of economic affairs (1804-07) and chief minister (1807-08) to Frederick William III. he introduced wide-ranging reforms in administration, taxation, and the civil service that modernized the Prus¬ sian government. He abolished serfdom, reformed the laws on land own¬ ership, and helped reorganize the military. Anticipating war with France, he was forced to resign under pressure from Napoleon (1808) and fled to Austria. As an adviser to Tsar Alexander I (1812-15), he negotiated the Russo-Prussian Treaty of Kalisz (1813) that formed the last European coalition against Napoleon.
Stein-Leventhal syndrome See
Steinbeck, John (Ernst) (b. Feb.
Dec. 20, 1968, New York, N.Y.) U.S. novelist. Steinbeck intermittently attended Stanford University and worked as a manual labourer before his books attained success. He spent much of his life in Monterey county,
Calif. His reputation rests mostly on the naturalistic novels on proletarian themes that he wrote in the 1930s.
Among them are Tortilla Flat (1935), In Dubious Battle (1936), Of Mice and Men (1937), and the acclaimed The Grapes of Wrath (1939, Pulitzer Prize), which aroused widespread sympathy for the plight of migratory farm workers. In World War II he served as a war correspon¬ dent. His later novels include Can¬ nery Row (1945), The Pearl (1947),
The Wayward Bus (1947), and East of Eden (1952). He received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962.
Steinberg, Saul orig. Saul Jacobson (b. June 15, 1914, Ramnicu Sarat, Rom.—d. May 12, 1999, New York, N.Y., U.S.) Romanian-born U.S. cartoonist and illustrator. He studied architecture in Milan, mean¬ while publishing cartoons in Italian magazines. Settling in New York City in 1942, he worked as a freelance artist, illustrator, and cartoonist, mainly for The New Yorker. His extraordinarily original and instantly recogniz¬ able works are often surrealistic or whimsically nightmarish visions of contemporary America and frequently employ odd versions of pop-culture icons. His subject matter ranges from the whimsical (e.g., a wicker chair overtaken by its curlicues) to the satirical (sinister, overgrown gadgets) to the philosophical (a tiny figure perched on a giant question mark balanced at the edge of an abyss). See photograph above.
Steinem, Gloria (b. March 25, 1934, Toledo, Ohio, U.S.) U.S. politi¬ cal activist, feminist, and editor. She began her career as a writer and journalist in New York and became deeply involved in the women's lib-
Saul Steinberg, photograph by Arnold Newman, 1951.
©ARNOLD NEWMAN
Eration movement in the late 1960s. In 1971 she was a founder of the National Women’s Political Caucus, and in 1972 she founded Ms., a trendsetting magazine that she subsequently edited, to treat contemporary issues from a feminist perspective. In the 1970s and ’80s she founded or cofounded other women’s organizations, including the National Organi¬ zation for Women. Her books include Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions (1983), Marilyn (1986), and Revolution from Within (1992).
Steiner, (Francis) George (b. April 23, 1929, Paris, France) French- bom U.S.-Swiss critic. Steiner became a U.S. citizen in 1944 but spent much of his time in Europe, teaching principally at Cambridge Univer¬ sity and the University of Geneva. He studied the relationship between literature and society, particularly in light of modern history, and his writ¬ ings on language and the Holocaust reached a wide nonacademic audi¬ ence. Among his works are The Death of Tragedy (1960), Language and Silence (1967), essays on the dehumanizing effects of World War II on literature, After Babel (1975), on the intersection of culture and linguis¬ tics, In Bluebeard’s Castle (1971), and several works of fiction.
Steiner, Maximilian Raoul Walter) (b. May 10, 1888, Vienna, Austria—-d. Dec. 28, 1971, Hollywood, Calif., U.S.) Austrian-born U.S. composer and conductor. A prodigy, he wrote an operetta at age 14 that ran in Vienna for a year. He immigrated to the U.S. in 1914 and worked in New York City as a theatre conductor and arranger, and then he moved to Hollywood in 1929. He became one of the first and finest (if not sub¬ tlest) movie composers, establishing many techniques that became stan¬ dard, with his scores for King Kong (1933), The Informer (1935, Academy Award), Gone with the Wind (1939), Now, Voyager (1942, Academy Award), Since You Went Away (1944, Academy Award), The Big Sleep (1946), The Fountainhead (1949), and many others.
Steiner Yshfi-nar\, Rudolf (b. Feb. 27, 1861, Kraljevic, Austria—d. March 30, 1925, Dornach, Switz.) Austrian-Swiss social and spiritual philosopher, founder of anthroposophy. He edited the scientific works of Johann W. von Goethe and contributed to the standard edition of Goet¬ he’s complete works. During this period he wrote The Philosophy of Freedom (1894). Coming gradually to believe in spiritual perception inde¬ pendent of the senses, he called the result of his research “anthroposo¬ phy,” centring on “knowledge produced by the higher self in man.” In 1912 he founded the Anthroposophical Society. In 1913 he built his first Goetheanum, a “school of spiritual science,” in Dornach, Switz. In 1919 he founded a progressive school for workers at the Waldorf Astoria fac¬ tory, which led to the international Waldorf School movement. Steiner’s other writings include The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity (1894), Occult Science (1913), and Story of My Life (1924).
Steinmetz Vshtln- 1 mets,\ English \'stln- l mets\, Charles Proteus orig. Karl August Rudolf Steinmetz (b. April 9, 1865, Breslau, Prussia—d. Oct. 26, 1923, Schenectady, N.Y., U.S.) German-born U.S. electrical engineer. Forced to leave Germany because of his socialist activities, he emigrated to the U.S. in 1889 and began working for Gen¬ eral Electric Co. in 1893. He taught at Union College from 1902. His experiments led to the law of hysteresis, which deals with power loss in electrical machinery when magnetic action is converted to unusable heat; the constant he calculated (by age 27) has remained a part of electrical engineering vocabulary. In 1893 he developed a simplified symbolic
POLYCYSTIC OVARY SYNDROME
27, 1902, Salinas, Calif., U.S.—d.
John Steinbeck.
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1818 I Steinway ► Steno
method of calculating alternating- current phenomena. He also studied electrical transients (changes of very short duration in electrical circuits; e.g., lightning); his theory of travel¬ ing waves led to development of devices to protect high-power trans¬ mission lines from lightning bolts and to the design of a powerful gen¬ erator. He patented over 200 inven¬ tions.