Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    A Study Guide for Gertrude Stein's "The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas"
    A Study Guide for Gertrude Stein's "The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas"
    A Study Guide for Gertrude Stein's "The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas"
    Ebook35 pages19 minutes

    A Study Guide for Gertrude Stein's "The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas"

    By Gale and Cengage

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    A Study Guide for Gertrude Stein's "The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Nonfiction Classics for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Nonfiction Classics for Students for all of your research needs.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCengage Learning - Gale
    Release dateSep 20, 2016
    ISBN9781535835152
    A Study Guide for Gertrude Stein's "The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas"

    Read more from Gale

    Related to A Study Guide for Gertrude Stein's "The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas"

    Related ebooks

    Literary Criticism For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    Related categories

    Reviews for A Study Guide for Gertrude Stein's "The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas"

    0 ratings

    0 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      A Study Guide for Gertrude Stein's "The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas" - Gale

      1

      The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas

      Gertrude Stein

      1933

      Introduction

      The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, published in 1933, is Gertrude Stein's best-selling work and her most accessible. Consisting of seven chapters covering the first three decades of the twentieth century, the book is only incidentally about Toklas's life. Its real subject, and narrator, is Stein herself, who reportedly had asked Toklas, her lifelong companion, for years to write her autobiography. When Toklas did not, Stein did. Stein published excerpts of the work in the Atlantic, which occasioned a response from behavioral psychologist B. F. Skinner whose essay, Has Gertrude Stein a Secret? connected the style Stein employed in the book with her work on automatic writing in Harvard's psychology laboratories a few decades before. Automatic writing, popularized by the surrealists in the 1920s, was writing that follows unconscious as well as conscious thought of the author. Stein's writing certainly has some of that element in the Autobiography but on the whole she sticks to telling a story of her life and times in more or less chronological order. That life includes details of her relationships with artists and writers who would become some of the most famous of the twentieth century, including Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Ernest Hemingway, Max Jacob, and Sherwood Anderson. Stein's book is modernist not only because she discusses modernist art and artists but because of how she represents her subject through indirection, paradox, repetition, and contradiction.

      Author Biography

      Born in Allegheny, Pennsylvania, on February 3, 1874 to Daniel and Amelia (Keyser) Stein, Gertrude Stein became a voice for the avant-garde in twentieth-century art. Her cosmopolitan attitudes and tastes were formed early, as she spent five of the first six years of her life in Vienna (where her father studied the banking business) and in Paris. In 1880 the Steins moved to Oakland, California, where her father worked as a stockbroker. After her parents died, Stein moved to Baltimore to live with her aunt. During the

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1