Gertrude Stein was born in Allegheny, Pennsylvania, in a family of well-educated, cultured German Jews. Her father, Daniel Stein, accumulated a fortune from railways and real estate. Gertrude was the youngest of five siblings. She was raised partly in Vienna and Paris, and partly in Oakland, California. Both parents died when she was still young, and after having spent a few years with an older brother in San Francisco she went to stay with relatives in Baltimore. In 1893, Stein enrolled at Radcliffe College (part of Harvard University) and studied under William James, brother of the author Henry James, who was one of the most prominent American psychologists and philosophers at the time. His ideas about the nature of knowledge – knowledge is everything we know and what we know is what we experience in a continuous present – made a major impression on her during these early years of her education. After a couple of years of rather perfunctory studies at the John Hopkins Medical School she left university and moved to London in 1902. In London she was reunited with her favourite brother Leo who was soon to make himself a name as an art critic. The following year, brother and sister continued to Paris where they settled at the now famous address 27 Rue de Fleurus near the Jardin de Luxembourg, where Stein lived until 1938. Gertrude and Leo began to put together a collection of contemporary art that would earn Stein a reputation as the "high priestess" of the artistic avant-garde, especially after she started a salon in order to better organise the many visitors.