Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, The

an autobiography by Gertrude Stein, published in 1933. The autobiography, written as though the author were her private secretary, Alice B. Toklas (also her lifelong companion and lover), is important not so much for what it tells us about Gertrude Stein's life as for its evocation of American expatriate life in Paris and its occasionally philosophical commentary on twentieth-century culture. Unlike some of Stein's experimental prose writings, such as Tender Buttons (1914) and The Making of Americans (1925), The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas is written in a relatively simple and direct manner and was very popular during her lifetime, although its treatment of certain figures provoked an attack from other Parisian writers and artists in Testimony Against Gertrude Stein (1935). A ‘sequel’, Everybody's Autobiography, was published in 1937. Ernest Hemingway, who knew Stein in Paris and helped her type the manuscript of The Making of Americans, writes somewhat dismissively of her in A Moveable Feast (1964).