The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas by Gertrude Stein

Her Saturday 'salons' brought people such as Ernest Hemingway, Sherwood Anderson, F. Toklas, was a meeting place for artists, writers, and musicians. Her apartment at 27, rue de Fleurus, which she shared with her brother Leo and later with her companion Alice B. These thinkers were to have a profound impact on Stein's approaches to writing and her taste in art collecting. During the 1890s, she attended Radcliffe, studying composition with William Vaughn Moody, philosophy with George Santayana, and psychology with William James.

After her parents died, Stein moved to Baltimore to live with her aunt. In 1880 the Steins moved to Oakland, California, where her father worked as a stockbroker. Her cosmopolitan attitudes and tastes were formed early, as she spent five of the first six years of her life in Vienna (where her father studied the banking business) and in Paris. Author Biographyīorn in Allegheny, Pennsylvania, on Februto Daniel and Amelia (Keyser) Stein, Gertrude Stein became a voice for the avant-garde in twentieth-century art. Stein's book is modernist not only because she discusses modernist art and artists but because of how she represents her subject through indirection, paradox, repetition, and contradiction. That life includes details of her relationships with artists and writers who would become some of the most famous of the twentieth century, including Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Ernest Hemingway, Max Jacob, and Sherwood Anderson. Stein's writing certainly has some of that element in the Autobiography but on the whole she sticks to telling a story of her life and times in more or less chronological order. Automatic writing, popularized by the surrealists in the 1920s, was writing that follows unconscious as well as conscious thought of the author. Skinner whose essay, 'Has Gertrude Stein a Secret?' connected the style Stein employed in the book with her work on automatic writing in Harvard's psychology laboratories a few decades before. Stein published excerpts of the work in the Atlantic, which occasioned a response from behavioral psychologist B. Its real subject, and narrator, is Stein herself, who reportedly had asked Toklas, her lifelong companion, for years to write her autobiography.

Consisting of seven chapters covering the first three decades of the twentieth century, the book is only incidentally about Toklas's life. Toklas, published in 1933, is Gertrude Stein's best-selling work and her most accessible.

The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas by Gertrude Stein