The Biography of Alice B. Toklas

In Paris, Gertrude reigned, but Alice ruled. She was cook, critic, publisher, lover, and muse to one of the most celebrated women of letters in this century. This first biography of Gertrude Stein’s companion, Alice B. Toklas, takes us from her childhood in San Francisco through her instant attraction and forty year devotion to the woman she believed to be a genius. Toklas emerges as a formidable personality, choosing and rejecting Gertrude’s friends from their brilliant coterie: Hemingway (“I made Gertrude get rid of him”), Pound (“so sad and so very mistaken”), Fitzgerald (“the most gifted and intelligent of all”), Picasso, Matisse, and many more. Author Linda Simon has woven a deeply affecting portrait of the woman “married” to a great literary pathfinder – a relationship that would help to shape the course of the arts in modern times.

Contained within its pages are photographs by Carl Van Vechten, Cecil Beaton, and others; a complete bibliography; and a thirty-page appendix in which obscure references in Gertrude’s writings are explained.

“It’s fitting that Alice B. Toklas . . . should be the subject of a biography. With her acid tongue, shrewd judgement, vitality, and intense loyalty she was a fairly remarkable person in herself.” – Publishers Weekly.