Alice Babette Toklas was an American-born member of the Parisian avant-garde of the early 20th century, and the life partner of American writer Gertrude Stein. Toklas met Stein in Paris on September 8, 1907, the day she arrived there from San Francisco after the devastating 1906 San Francisco earthquake. Together they hosted a salon in the home they shared 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. Acting as Stein's confidante, lover, cook, secretary, muse, editor, critic, and general organizer, Toklas remained a background figure, chiefly living in the shadow of Stein, until the publication by Stein of Toklas' "memoirs" in 1933 under the teasing title The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, which went on to become Stein's best-selling book. In 1954 Toklas published a book of her own, The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook, which mixed reminiscences and recipes. The most famous recipe, contributed by her friend Brion Gysin, is for "Haschich Fudge", a mixture of fruit, nuts, spices, and "canibus sativa" [sic] or marijuana. Her name was later lent to the range of cannabis concoctions called "Alice B. Toklas brownies" (despite the fact that the "Haschich Fudge" recipe did not originate with Toklas, nor is there any record that she ever made it herself). In 1963 Toklas published her autobiography What Is Remembered, which ends abruptly with the death of Stein.