LU271 Left Bank Lit: "The Autobiography of Alice B. Tolkas," by Gertrude Stein

Gertrude Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933) is one of the most charming and paradoxical works of modernist literature—a memoir written by Stein, but in the voice of her lifelong companion, Alice B. Toklas.

Through this playful act of ventriloquism, Stein recounts their shared life in Paris from the early 1900s through the 1930s, when their apartment at 27 rue de Fleurus became the heart of the city’s artistic avant-garde. On Saturday evenings, their salon gathered an extraordinary constellation of painters and writers—Picasso, Matisse, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Pound, and many others—who came to debate, provoke, and be seen. The book mixes gossip and genius, art history and personal mythmaking, with Stein’s distinctive, rhythmic prose giving the whole an almost musical quality. Both self-portrait and social chronicle,

The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas captures the exuberance and eccentricity of a generation inventing itself in real time. As the closing work in your series, it returns the reader to the source: the Left Bank as a living ecosystem of conversation, experiment, and friendship—a “moveable feast” of its own making.