Stanley J. Stein was born in June 1920. He died 99 years later in December 2019, just months from his 100th birthday. At the time of his death, Stein was emeritus at Princeton University, where he had been the Walter Samuel Carpenter III Professor of Spanish Civilization and Culture since joining the Princeton faculty in 1953.
Stein was born in New York to eastern European immigrants who arrived at the United States shortly after the twentieth century's turn. He grew up on the Lower East Side, where Italians, Irish, and Jews lived alongside one another but did not mingle, as he later recalled.1 After graduating from the City College of New York in 1941, he went to Harvard to begin Spanish- and French-language studies. A course in Brazilian literature piqued an interest in nineteenth-century indianismo, and he set off to Rio in early 1942. There he met Barbara...
