The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas

Alice B. Toklas was born in San Francisco, California. Her ancestors included a pioneer who came to California in 1849 and a colonel for the French conqueror Napoleon. However, Toklas had a more pacific temperament, preferring art, music, and domestic pursuits. As a girl, she admired the novelist Henry James and even wrote to him, saying that she wanted to dramatize his novel The Awkward Age. Until the age of 20, Toklas was a serious music practitioner; however, the death of her mother caused her to realize that the piano was not her true passion. Similarly, while Toklas felt her young adult life in San Francisco was “reasonably full,” she was “not very ardent in it” (3).

Her life changed course permanently after the San Francisco fire, when Gertrude Stein’s elder brother Leo and his wife returned to the city from Paris. Toklas was transfixed by the three Matisse paintings Mrs. Stein had brought and her stories of Paris. She told her father she was going to go to Paris. When Toklas met Gertrude Stein there, she was impressed by her voice and her “genius” and began to form her new life around it (4).