The Making of Americans

Gertrude Stein's monumental novel, back in print a century after its first publication.

In The Making of Americans, Gertrude Stein sets out to tell 'a history of a family's progress,' radically reworking the traditional family saga novel to encompass her vision of personality and psychological relationships. As the history progresses over three generations, Stein also meditates on her own writing, on the making of The Making of Americans, and on America.

'The Making of Americanspresents a no less radical challenge to the realist novel's concept of character thanFinnegans Wake, written twenty-eight years later; in this respect, it also predates the formal innovations of Samuel Beckett'sThe Unnamableand Alain Robbe-Grillet'sJealousyby over four decades.' Bookforum

'Indubitably the most monumental fiction to be given since the publication ofUlysses.' Saturday Review of Literature

'This sober, tender-hearted, very searching history of a family's progress, comprehends in its picture of life which is distinctively American, a psychology which is universal.' Marianne Moore,Dial

'The Making of Americansis the first announcement of what would be Stein's greatest legacy to reclaim the world of the nineteenth-century woman from such weird, smutty interlopers as Flaubert and, later, Joyce, and transform it into the most exalted ground of human potentiality available to us... It is monumental, horribly flawed, and a joy to read if you just give up and drown in it.' Matthew Stadler, The Stranger