Page "Alice B. Toklas" Paragraph 2

She was born Alice Babette Toklas in San Francisco, California, into a middle-class Jewish family and attended schools in both San Francisco and Seattle.

For a short time she also studied music at the University of Washington.

She met Gertrude Stein in Paris on September 8, 1907, the day she arrived.

Together they hosted a salon 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.