Staying on Alone

This 1973 Vintage Books edition collects the correspondence of Alice B. Toklas during the twenty years following Gertrude Stein's death in 1946, edited by Edward Burns with an introduction by Gilbert Harrison. Written in Toklas's tiny, precise hand on tissue-thin paper, these letters reveal a sharp observer of modernist culture navigating grief, poverty, and the complicated legacy of her partnership with Stein.

The letters sparkle with shrewd observations about twentieth-century luminaries: Thornton Wilder, Cecil Beaton, Carl Van Vechten, Anita Loos, and many others. Toklas writes with wit about Picasso, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and the changing Paris literary scene, all while managing Stein's literary estate and struggling with diminishing resources. Her voice—devoted yet independent, gossipy yet profound—emerges distinct from Stein's famous ventriloquism in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas.

This Vintage paperback made Toklas's remarkable correspondence accessible to general readers, revealing that the woman often treated as merely Stein's companion possessed her own genius for friendship, observation, and epistolary art. The collection documents midcentury modernism's twilight years through the eyes of one of its most perceptive witnesses.

Publishing Details: Vintage Books (imprint of Random House), New York, 1973. Trade paperback. Edited by Edward Burns. Introduction by Gilbert A. Harrison.