Narrative
The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas
Gertrude Stein · 1933
Synopsis
Alice Toklas, born in San Francisco, tells of her arrival in Paris in 1907 and her life with Gertrude Stein, at 27 rue de Fleurus. We see the studio with walls covered in canvases bought before others wanted them, the Saturday evenings when Picasso and Matisse come, the wives of the geniuses whom she has to look after while their husbands talk to her friend, the war spent delivering supplies to hospitals in the south of France in a Ford van, then the young Americans of the post-war years, Ernest Hemingway among them.
Context
The book was written in six weeks, in October and November 1932, for the money according to her biographers. The Atlantic Monthly, which had been rejecting her texts since 1919, ran about six tenths of it in four instalments from May 1933, before the Harcourt, Brace volume at the end of the summer. Chosen by the Literary Guild, it sold well and earned her a lecture tour of the United States in 1934 and 1935. In February 1935, Henri Matisse, Georges Braque, Tristan Tzara, André Salmon and Eugene and Maria Jolas published a collective rebuttal in a supplement to the journal transition; her brother Leo spoke of a tissue of lies.
Who it is for
Seven roughly chronological chapters, in simple language: it is the most accessible of her books. It reads like a chronicle and is hard to verify.
Prizes and reception
Her only major bestseller; in 1998 the Modern Library ranked it among the twenty best English-language non-fiction books of the century.
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