Getrude Stein and a Companion 1
Gertrude Stein was an American novelist, poet, playwright and art collector. Born and raised in the USA, she moved to Paris in 1903. And made France her home for the remainder of her life.
Alice Toklas is remembered for two things: being Gertrude Stein’s great love and writing her unusual, revered memoir-disguised-as-cookbook, chronicling their life together. She met Stein on her first day as an America expat in Paris and fell in love immediately.
Both Stein and Alice Toklas rejected the conservative values of middle-class America in the early nineteen-hundreds and found refuge in the bohemian decadence of Paris … and in each other. Together they hosted a salon in the home they shared that attracted expatriate American writers, such as Ernest Hemingway, Paul Bowles, Thornton Wilder, and Sherwood Anderson; and avant-garde painters, including Picasso, Matisse, and Braque.