Remembered for a bestselling autobiography she did not write and a cannabis fudge recipe she did not invent, Alice B. Toklas was far more than the quiet woman standing behind Gertrude Stein. After the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, she left for Paris, met Stein on her second day in the city, and helped build the most famous salon in modern literary history at 27 Rue de Fleurus, where Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Picasso, and Matisse passed through the doors.

This deep dive traces her life as cook, editor, secretary, and fierce gatekeeper, through two world wars and a morally complex survival under Nazi occupation, to the legal erasure that followed Stein's death in 1946. Denied any legal standing as a same-sex partner, Alice reinvented herself as a writer in her seventies before dying in poverty in 1967.

• How the earthquake functioned a ...