The Making of Americans

By Gertrude Stein

Book Overview

The Making of Americans is not really a novel, as Gertrude Stein's narrator says-"not just an ordinary kind of novel with a plot and conversations to amuse you"-but an attempt at a thorough and exacting distillation of the essential properties of peoples' behavior. Through sentences that seem to repeat themselves, we are presented, on the surface, with a portrait of the "simple middle class monotonous tradition" as enacted by generations of the Dehning and Hersland families and their acquaintances. Underneath this is a slow, sieved attempt at something like total knowledge, an excavation of an overwhelming impulse "to understand the complete being in each one and all the details of their coming to have in them their kind of feeling...anything in them that gives to them inside them the feeling of being distinguished to themselves inside them."

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1087929563
• ISBN13: 9781087929569
• Release Date: December 2020
• Publisher: Long Dead Editions
• Length: 858 Pages
• Weight: 2.97 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.9" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

Beautifully written!

It is a shame that so much of Gertrude Stein's work is dismissed because of its unconventionality. Though sometimes difficult to read, Stein's writing has a lyrical quality about it unparalleled by the work of other writers. The Making of Americans is probably one of her best, and well worth the effort it might take to read it. I found that after only a few pages, I was moved along by the rhythm and cadence that carries the story. A wonderful read!

The great unsung classic of the twentieth century.

What starts of as an anecdotal recounting of what I imagine is Stein's forefathers and foremothers immigrant experience launches off into a brilliant, highly intellectual examination and rhapsody of individuality and conformity among other things (like death and consciousness and the battle between the sexes). This book will literally change the way you think you think. I think it should.