in Spain for a while, and eventually move back to France. There, they volunteer for the American Fund for the French Wounded, driving through France to help the wounded and homeless. By the end of the war, Paris seems changed. After the War, 1919–1932 Alice tells of Gertrude's argument with T. S. Eliot after he finds one of her writings inappropriate. She talks about her friendship with Sherwood Anderson and Ernest Hemingway, who helped with the publication of The Making of Americans. There the couple makes friends with a coterie of Russian artists, but they constitute no artistic movement. Later, Gertrude gives a lecture at Oxford University. Alice then mentions more parties with artists. Later, they abridge The Making of Americans to four hundred pages for commercial reasons and devise the idea of writing an autobiography. Literary significance and criticism Gertrude Stein admitted to writing the work in six weeks with the aim of 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 Stein's writings to be published in the Atlantic Monthly, much to her joy. The magazine published sixty per cent of the book, in four installments. As for 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; and Georges Braque thought that Stein had misconstrued Cubism. Her brother Leo Stein deemed it a "farrago of lies". The commercial success that came with her book enabled Stein to live a more prosperous lifestyle. According to Virgil Thomson, who wrote music to libretti written 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." Several critics, including Jeanette Winterson, have noted that in this book Stein created a new literary form, building upon Virginia Woolf's fictional biography Orlando to make her own reinterpretation of the autobiographical genre. See also Gertrude and Alice References Books by Gertrude Stein 1933 books American biographies Works originally published in