Born in Allegheny, Pennsylvania.  It does seem unlikely, but in American letters the unlikely is not unusual: Hart Crane came from Garretsville, Ohio; Pound was born in Idaho; neither Michigan nor Mississippi has any prima facie promise; Wallace Stevens saw exquisite light in Reading; Katherine Anne Porter in Indian Creek, Texas; Edward Arlington Robinson in Tide Head, Maine; and for T. S. Eliot even St. Louis is odd.  They mostly moved anyway.  Who thinks of Robert Frost as a tyke in San Francisco?  And the Steins left almost immediately for Vienna, where her father hoped that family connections there might help him in his wool business.  He really did write back that little Gertie “toddles around the whole day and repeats everything that’s said or done.”  After a period in Paris, the Steins returned to Baltimore, but soon they swapped houses, climates, coasts again, and crossed the country to live in Oakland, California, where Gertrude’s father became successfully connected with, for god’s sake, a cable railway company.

To be hoist up a hill.  And with certain exceptions modern American writing has been overwhelmed by space: rootlessness, we often say, that’s our illness, and we are right; we’re sick of changing house, of moving, of cutting loose, of living in vans and riding cycles, of using up and getting on (that’s how we age), until sometimes one feels there’s nothing but geography in this country, and certainly a geographical history is the only kind it can significantly have; so that the strange this is that generally those yaers which both Freud and the Roman Catholic Church find crucial to our character are seldom connected to the trunk, except perhaps as decals: memorials of Mammoth Cave, ads for Herold’s Club.  Well, what’s the point of being born in Oak Park if you’re going to kill yourself in Ketchum?  Our history simply became “the West” where time and life went.  So what’s the point in St. Paul if you are going to die in Hollywood of an alcoholic heart?  Like Henry James we developed an enlarged sense of locale, but we were tourists.  And Gertrude Stein lived in hotels, shops, trains, rented rooms, at aunts’, with friends, in flats, with chums, and grew up with her books, her body, and her brother— nothing more, and no on else.

— from “Gertrude Stein and the Geography of the Sentence” by William H. Gass