The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas

Description

"The Autogiography of Alice B. Toklas" is in fact Gertrude Stein's own autobiography, seen through the eyes of her friend, Alice B Toklas. With occasional glimpses into her early life, it describes her years in Paris until 1932. At 27 Rue de Fleurus, Gertrude Stein established a formidable literary and artistic salon, and this book provides a record of her friendships with some of the world's foremost artists and writers - Picasso, Apollinaire, Matisse and Braque - her impressions of Paris during the World War I and then the post-war American "invasion".

Gertrude Stein was a titan of early feminism and one of the great pioneers of the modernist world. Born in Pennsylvania in 1874, Stein lived through a period of global upheaval, writing groundbreaking literature and supporting emerging poets and artists. Luminaries like Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Ezra Pound, Jean Cocteau, Ernest Hemingway, and F. Scott Fitzgerald were regular visitors at her famous Paris salon, where she lived with her life partner of forty years, Alice B. Toklas. Her complex personal beliefs and politics still defy easy categorisation, inspiring controversy to this day. Stein was a one-woman renegade literary movement, and her body of work - including Three Lives, Tender Buttons, The Making of Americans, and The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas - broke a long succession of moulds. When she died in 1946, Gertrude Stein was a transcontinental literary icon, and one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century.

"Largely to amuse herself, [ Gertrude Stein ] wrote The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas in 1932...using as a sounding board her companion Miss Toklas, who had been with her for twenty-five years. It has been said that the writing takes on very much Miss Toklas' conversational style, and while this is true the style is still a variant of Miss Stein's conversation style. ...She usually insisted that writing is an entirely different thing from talking, and it is part of the miracle of this little scheme of objectification that she could by way of imitating Miss Toklas put in writing something of her own beautiful conversation. So that, aside from making a real present of her past, she created a figure of herself, established an identity a twin, a Doppelganger.... The book is full of the most lucid and shapely anecdotes, told in a purer and more closely fitting prose... than even Gide or Hemingway have ever commanded ...." -- Donald Sutherland ..." The record of nearly thirty years of life in a fantastically changing Paris and else where -- a life passed in the most stimulating and important society." -- Louis Bromfield ..." One of the richest, wittiest, and most irreverent [biographies] ever written." -- William Troy "From the Trade Paperback edition.