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Mar 17, 1990 | ISBN 9780679724636 Buy
Nov 01, 2000 | ISBN 9780679641957 Buy
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Mar 17, 1990 | ISBN 9780679724636
Nov 01, 2000 | ISBN 9780679641957
Stein’s most famous work; one of the richest and most irreverent biographies ever written.
Selected by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best nonfiction books of all time‘I always wanted to be historical,’ Gertrude Stein once quipped. In 1932, Stein began writing the ‘autobiography’ of her longtime friend and companion, Alice B. Toklas. The book, an immediate bestseller, guaranteed them both a place in history. An account of their life together in Paris before, during, and after World War I, it is full of the atmosphere of the changing life of the city and of idiosyncratic glimpses of such figures as Matisse, Picasso, Braque, Cocteau, Apollinaire, Pound, Eliot, Hemingway, and other luminaries and aspirants who were their close friends. But at the center of the narrative there is always the titanic figure of Gertrude Stein, the self-proclaimed ‘first-class genius’ who some dismissed as the ‘Mother Goose of Montparnasse,’ presiding over her celebrated residence-salon-art gallery at 27, rue de Fleurus. William Troy remarked about her: ‘It is not flippant to say that if she had not come to exist . . . it would be necessary to invent Miss Gertrude Stein.’
Gertrude Stein was born in Allegheny, Pennsylvania, on February 3, 1874. At Radcliffe College she studied under William James, who remained her lifelong friend, and then went to Johns Hopkins to study medicine. Abandoning her studies, she moved to Paris with… More about Gertrude Stein
"Largely to amuse herself, [ Gertrude Stein ] wrote The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas in 1932…using as a sounding board her companion Miss Toklas, who had been with her for twenty-five years. It has been said that the writing takes on very much Miss Toklas’ conversational style, and while this is true the style is still a variant of Miss Stein’s conversation style. …She usually insisted that writing is an entirely different thing from talking, and it is part of the miracle of this little scheme of objectification that she could by way of imitating Miss Toklas put in writing something of her own beautiful conversation. So that, aside from making a real present of her past, she created a figure of herself, established an identity a twin, a Doppelganger…. The book is full of the most lucid and shapely anecdotes, told in a purer and more closely fitting prose… than even Gide or Hemingway have ever commanded …. "— Donald Sutherland"… The record of nearly thirty years of life in a fantastically changing Paris and else where — a life passed in the most stimulating and important society."— Louis Bromfield"… One of the richest, wittiest, and most irreverent [biographies] ever written."— William Troy
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