Robert B. Haas | California educator, 94

Robert Bartlett Haas, 94, a longtime University of California, Los Angeles, educator who spent years immersed in the writings of Gertrude Stein, died April 20 at a hospital in Nuertingen, Germany, after a brief illness. He had spent most of his retirement years in Germany.

Dr. Haas' interest in Stein, the experimental American writer and poet, dated to his years as an undergraduate student at the University of California, Berkeley. They started corresponding and finally met in 1946, shortly before her death in France at age 72.

Dr. Haas "was one of the young men who sought out Gertrude Stein as a mentor and was rewarded with years of encouragement and friendship and who, in turn, devoted a measure of his academic life to bolstering Stein's reputation," Timothy Young, curator of Rare Books and Manuscripts at Yale University's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, told the Los Angeles Times in an e-mail. Young cataloged Stein's papers at Yale.

Among Dr. Haas' books about Stein was A Primer for the Gradual Understanding of Gertrude Stein, published in 1971, in which he is credited as editor.

- Los Angeles Times