Born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Stein moved to Paris in 1903 where she became an influential cultural figure at the heart of the Modernist movement -- through her experimental writings, her impressive art collection, and her salons which hosted the leading cultural lights of the early twentieth century, including the likes of Pablo Picasso, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound, and Henri Matisse. Although the main body of her literary output was deemed too radical for popular success, her "memoir" of the Paris years, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, written in the voice of her life partner, Alice B. Toklas, was a bestseller and propelled Stein from the obscurity of a cult literary scene into the limelight of mainstream attention. A lesbian, Stein was the author of one of the earliest coming out stories "Q.E.D", originally written in 1903, and her essay "Miss Furr and Miss Skeene" is often considered to contain the first published use of the word "gay" (which it uses over one hundred times) in reference to same-sex relationships and those who have them.