A fascinating insight into the vibrant culture of Modernism & the rich artistic world of Paris's Left Bank Gertrude Stein's The Autobiography of Alice B Toklas
Includes:: an introduction by Thomas Fensch in Penguin Modern Classics For Gertrude Stein & her wife Alice B Toklas life in Paris was based upon the rue de Fleurus & the Saturday evenings & 'it was like a kaleidoscope slowly turning' Picasso was there with 'his high whinnying Spanish giggle' as were Cezanne & Matisse Hemingway & Fitzgerald As Toklas put it
- ' The geniuses came & talked to Gertrude Stein & the wives sat with me' A light-hearted entertainment this is in fact Gertrude Stein's own autobiography & a roll-call of all the extraordinary painters & writers she met between 1903 & 1932 Audacious sardonic & characteristically self-confident this is a definitive account by American in Paris Gertrude Stein (1874-1946) a writer of experimental prose is one of the original American Modernists Born in Pennsylvania she lived most of her life in Paris with her partner Alice B Toklas Experimental books like Three Lives (1909) Tender Buttons (1914) & The Making of Americans (1925) established her reputation as an avant-garde stylist & The Autobiography of Alice B Toklas made her an international celebrity As an experimental writer she has been an inspiration to countless novelists & poets in our century from Ernest Hemingway & Edith Sitwell in her own time to Jack Kerouac & Robert Duncan in ours If you enjoyed The Autobiography of Alice B Toklas you might like Virginia Woolf's Orlando also available in Penguin Modern Classics' Buttonholes the reader with its informality its unhurried rhythms deadpan humour & acerbic remarks' Frances Spalding Sunday Times