The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas - Literary Significance and Criticism

Literary Significance and Criticism

Gertrude Stein admitted to writing the work in six weeks with an end to making money. However, she did not like writing it for that particular reason, and Alice didn't think it would be a success. It was the first of her writings to be published in the Atlantic Monthly, much to her joy. The magazine published sixty per cent of the novel, in four installments.

As to her friends, Carl Van Vechten liked it. Henry McBride thought it was too commercial. Ernest Hemingway called it a 'damned pitiful book'. Henri Matisse was offended by the descriptions of his wife. Georges Braque thought Stein had misconstrued Cubism. Leo Stein deemed it a farrago of lies. The commercial success that came with this book enabled Stein to live a more prosperous lifestyle.

According to Virgil Thomson, who wrote music to libretti authored by Stein, the "book is in every way except actual authorship Alice Toklas's book; it reflects her mind, her language, her private view of Gertrude, also her unique narrative powers. Every story in it is told as Alice herself had always told it....Every story that ever came into the house eventually got told in Alice's way, and this was its definitive version.".

Considered to be the one of the most accessible of Stein's works, several literary critics, including Jeanette Winterson, have noted that Stein creates a new format, building upon Virginia Woolf's Orlando, a fictional biography, in her own reinterpretation of the autobiography.