Stein and Toklas saw their previously ardent set of prewar friends, such as Matisse and Picasso, disperse. Matisse had moved to Nice, and Stein and Picasso were more distant, although she did go to stay with him at Antibes on the Côte d’Azur.

Stein struggled to gain recognition for her literary output and to get her work in publications such as the Atlantic Monthly. Still, she was prolific and took up the eccentric habit of writing in the car; she would take in the sound and movement of the streets and then think of a sentence “as a sort of tuning fork and metronome and then [writing] to that time and tune” (175).

They met new people, including the American expat Sylvia Beach, who would establish the famous Shakespeare and Company English-language bookshop on Paris’s Left Bank in 1951. Representatives from each new artistic movement were guests at their house. They included Dadaism founder Tristan Tzara, who first appeared in Paris, and the photographer Man Ray, who took pictures of Stein and other famous people. While they befriended American poet Ezra Pound, Stein disliked him. She called him the dull village explainer and he took offense, ending their intimacy. While Stein and T.