The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas
‘I am fond of paintings, furniture, tapestry, houses and flowers and even vegetables and fruit trees. I like a view but I like to sit with my back turned to it.’
First published in 1933 at the height of Stein’s popularity and literary prowess, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas is one of the most avant-garde pieces of non-fiction of the last century.
Taking as its form that of ‘autobiography’, told through the eyes of her life partner Toklas, Stein’s book provoked wild debate, and was pored over for its representations of the elite Paris art scene. Charting Toklas’s early life in San Francisco, life in Paris with Stein and the war years spent in Spain, this is not only a wildly important piece of early LGBTQ+ literature, but, much like Woolf’s Orlando, which perhaps inspired it, this is Modernism at its finest.
‘The book is full of the most lucid and shapely anecdotes.’
Donald Sutherland
Among books of literary reminiscences Miss Stein’s is one of the richest, wittiest and most irreverent ever written.’
William Troy
