It is not widely known that Independence has an historical connection with the American-born writer Gertrude Stein. While living in Paris, Stein became close friends with an American expatriate painter named William Edwards Cook, who was born in Independence in 1881. It was Cook who taught Stein how to drive (so that she could transport supplies for the French during World War I). In her second autobiography, titled "Everybody’s Autobiography", she talks about her fondness for the state, and for Cook's hometown in particular, which she had never visited (although, as a child in San Francisco, she was well aware of the town's sudden celebrity as a horse racing center). Her fondness for Iowa is also partly attributable to her close friendship with American writer Carl Van Vechten (who would become her literary executor), who had grown up in nearby Cedar Rapids, Iowa. In 1933, when Stein traveled throughout the U.S. on a book publicity tour, she eagerly agreed to speak at Iowa City (on the second floor of what is now the Prairie Lights Bookstore), with the provision that she would be able to fly over Independence, to see Cook's birthplace from the air. Unfortunately, the Midwest was hit by a major winter storm that day, and Stein's visit to Iowa was entirely cancelled. Cook himself had returned to Independence for an extended visit in 1925, to assist in settling the affairs of his father, an Independence lawyer who had died the year before. When Cook returned to Paris, he used part of his inheritance to commission a young architect named Le Corbusier to design, on the outskirts of Paris, what is now considered to be one of the first Cubist houses, called Maison Cook or Villa Cook.