Robert Bartlett Haas collection on Gertrude Stein and the Conference Press

Robert Bartlett Haas, American scholar and educator. Haas was born January 20, 1916, in Santa Cruz, California. He graduated with a bachelor's degree in English from the University of California, Berkeley in 1938, a master's in English from the University of Chicago and a doctorate in education from Stanford. He joined the University of California Los Angeles faculty in 1949 and was the founding director of the school's arts and humanities extension division. Haas remained at UCLA until his retirement in the late 1970s. He spent most of his retirement years in Nuertingen, Germany and died there after a brief illness, on April 20, 2010.

Haas's scholarship primarily focused on Gertrude Stein and he wrote several books on her, including A Catalogue of the Published and Unpublished Writings of Gertrude Stein (Yale University Library, 1941), Reflection on the Atomic Bomb: The Previously Uncollected Writings of Gertrude Stein, Volume I (Black Sparrow Press, 1973), and How Writing Is Written: Volume II of the Previously Uncollected Writings of Gertrude Stein (Black Sparrow Press, 1975). He also edited A Primer for the Gradual Understanding of Gertrude Stein (Black Sparrow Press, 1971).

The Conference Press was the creation of three UCLA students, Hal Levy, Gilbert A. Harrison, and William Bayard Okie. Harrison developed a friendship with Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, which led to the publication of Stein's work What Are Masterpieces? by the Conference Press in 1940. During Bartlett's tenure at UCLA, he was involved in the publication and distribution process of the press and wrote the introduction to What Are Masterpieces?